


Ridertale: The Ultimate Darkness

by reallysmallgiantrobot



Category: Kamen Rider Kuuga, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Death, Eye Contact, Gen, Guilt, Judgement, Metafiction, Murder, Murderous Ideation, Soul-Searching, Spoilers, Suicidal Ideation, Undertale Spoilers, Violence, invasive thoughts, kamen rider kuuga spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reallysmallgiantrobot/pseuds/reallysmallgiantrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is calling Godai Yuusuke to the empty world beneath Mt. Ebott.</p><p>But it is not as empty as it is supposed; something waits for him in the darkness, something that recognizes in him a kindred spirit.</p><p>===</p><p>Note the First: Takes place after a True Ending/True Pacifist Run, but contains information and spoilers for a No Mercy run, so spoilers abound for Undertale.  They also abound for Kamen Rider Kuuga, but that series is more than 15 years old at the time of this writing so that is less consequential.</p><p>Note the Second: Also contains speculation, vague though it is, about an important Undertale character's history and origins.  It is only speculation and there to serve this crossover story.  As this whole thing is absurdly non-canonical, I encourage grains of salt and a little patience with artistic license.  If this clashes with official lore (you know, outside of the thing where the crossover itself happens) I do apologize and hope it's not story-breaking for you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Burden

Ichijou liked to call ahead, sometimes, when Godai's voice hit a certain frequency.  Usually, it was nothing, but on the off-chance that it wasn't, he liked to know that some of the other Riders were keeping an eye out for him, either to be his friends or to be the ones who put him down before he did any real damage to anybody.

There wasn’t a Kamen Rider who wasn’t potentially dangerous, of course, but Godai was one of the worst.  The thing that gave him his power, the Amadam, was a force of pure violence.  As Godai had grown into it, learned how to draw out every aspect of its power in defense of humanity against the reawakened Grongi, who were themselves powered by things which, if they were not Amadams, were functionally the same. 

The powers of the other Riders were dangerous, but they were largely dead, largely tools.  The Riders were those who had taken those tools and opposed the violent organizations which had intended to use those tools for evil.  But Godai was the tool and he was the organization.  A hunger for violence married to a frightful kind of power that just waited, waited, waited for the will of the man containing them to grow weak and become the final dark for humanity.

More than a few of the Riders were supernatural, Ichijou knew, but they were empowered by things that wanted something, something each Rider would never give.  But Ichijou knew that Godai, that seemingly-indolent man he adored, was too empathetic to be so strong because the will that governed Kuuga was not some external, supernatural will, but Godai’s own.

All that needed to happen for Kuuga to become what it wanted to be, what it was perhaps meant to be, was for Godai’s heart to break.

The Linto people, the ones who had restrained the Amadam in a shell called Arcle, the ones who had created the first Kuuga, the ones who had inadvertently called Godai to fight, had created a scapegoat to do all their violence for them because while they were peaceful, they also did not want to die but the Grongi felt a single-minded desire to kill them, built their entire culture around finding humiliating ways to kill the Linto.

They tied their weapon to a peaceful heart but warned always that “When the holy well runs dry, there will come the ultimate darkness”.  Sakurako and the other researchers as Jounan University had said that the ‘holy well’ was compassion.

And Ichijou had seen in Godai—in flashes behind the beautiful man’s beautiful eyes—moments where at the very least that well was greatly depleted.

He’d almost killed him for it on a couple occasions.  Ichijou kept a ridiculously-powerful handgun loaded with the last six remaining nerve-destroying bullets, the ones the police developed for killing the Grongi, just in case Godai’d needed to be stopped.  The instructions Godai gave him that day were always crisp in his mind.  Once in the waist where the Amadam rested, once in the head.  Kill the power source and the body it was running as quickly as possible.

Ichijou was an excellent marksman.  He’d done it once before on the king Grongi, the one designated Number Zero, after Godai had been driven half-mad trying to knock him down.  Under the armor and the flame, Number Zero—“Daguva,” Godai’s voice reminded him, “his name was Daguva.”—looked just like some kid.  Some nicely-dressed kid.  All the pain and the horror and the murder which the smiling youth had committed… Ichijou had expected for his eyes to be dead, to be empty, to be like the violent men he sometimes interrogated in the service of finding justice for the victims of their violence.  But nothing in Zero’s eyes was blank.  Nothing was empty.  He was laughing like a kid in a park, like a kid half-drunk and in love for the first time running down the street wishing he could tell someone but instead just bumping into people and apologizing and feeling like he’d never been so alive.

A part of him had wanted to let the kid go.  To follow his training and arrest him, to make him answer for all the horror he’d loosed on what they now euphemistically referred to by its date (January 7th, 2001) but which they had called “The Day of Flame” in the aftermath.  He’d wanted to do the right thing, the just thing, the thing that would do the most good for the most people.

But if the kid got up, if his Amadam repaired itself, if he got going again, Godai would have to fight him and maybe Godai would become something worse in the process.  If Godai won, it would be terrible.  If Godai lost?  The whole world would burn.

He shot Zero once in the waist, once in the head.  He didn’t move again.

Then he looked down at Godai and watched the man he’d come to love, half-delirious with pain and the urges he whispered about the Amadam pushing into him, trying to remember himself after the revelation that for all their fearsome power and transformations, the Grongi were as human as Godai himself. 

Ichijou wished that the look of suicidal relief hadn’t been what he saw in Godai’s face that night, wished that the first thing that woke Godai up would have been love enough to have conquered the fear and hate and screaming disgust at what Kuuga, Daguva, and the Grongi had made of him.

Ichijou wondered if he should blame himself for that, for not being as expressive as Godai was, for not being as outwardly kind, for not knowing how to comfort the man when the horror of all the violence would wash over him like a wave and leave him sobbing and clawing at Ichijou’s flesh and howling apologies into Ichijou’s chest as his body temperature went through the roof.  If he could have found a way to make Godai understand how much Ichijou loved him.

But he showed it the only way he knew how:

Godai always told him where they could meet next.

And if it was too much for Godai, if he was going to become another Daguva, Ichijou would stop that from happening.  He would, at the very least, save Godai’s soul.


	2. Part I: Empty

It had been a long time since Godai had felt a call that hard.  That first time, it had been the promise of the power to change things, the power to stand between what he’d thought was a monster and the people that monster was hurting.  But for all that word, ‘monster’ was the first one his mind went to when he thought of the Grongi, he knew it was a gross oversimplification, one that would lead him to easy, uncomplicated thinking.  The spider Grongi, whatever its name, was as human as Godai himself.

The question was not one of nature, he had to keep reminding himself, but one of choice.  The Grongi could, at any point, have chosen to be other than what they were.

And yet they had done, just as he could have ignored the call of the Arcle and the Amadam it contained (or, from a certain perspective, imprisoned).  He wasn’t especially heroic, he was just the first one to hear it calling or the first one to act on it.  Godai had made his choice and while many were the nights he wished he’d made a different one, that someone else had stepped up, that someone else had welcomed the power and the hunger into themselves and freed him from it, that choice was made.

Just as was the choice to heed the call again.

He took a plane this time.  The call was insistent instead of coming to him in flashes, more a feeling than a vision.  More a beacon promising knowledge than an urging to action.  Maybe it would have been faster to just transform again, to run, jump, or swim, to call up his once-faithful (now fearful) servant, Gouram, and ask it to fly him where he was going.

But he hadn’t.  Just called Ichijou and Mika and told them he was heading back to the States.  Mika sent along a list of souvenirs he could pick up for her and Ichijou just asked if he should be following along.  No promises were made to Mika but to Ichijou?  He just asked the man to keep an eye on the news.  Shiro, Jo, and Kazuma were all spread out in the States and if anything happened, they’d contact him.

Ichijou would know what to do.

Godai loved that about the man; that he always knew what to do.  That Godai could count on him for that.

He left the airport hours after he arrived, the passport authority afraid that he was another foreigner looking to steal their American-ness or stay there indefinitely.  It had taken a while—and a call to the Japanese embassy in California, where they practically knew him by name—to convince them that he was just one of those frustrating people who just travelled a lot.

A part of him almost wished there’d been a longer delay with the officials because at least when he was busy or waiting, the call was weaker.  He was sure if he got himself busy doing something else, he could ignore it and that maybe, eventually, it would go away, just one more bit of weird sensory noise he got through his enhanced senses, one more weird alien call that honed in on the frequency of the strangeness that lived inside him.

On the other hand, he was curious.

He tried to be cautious as well, but the concept of hazard had changed for him since the Arcle and Amadam had made him into Kuuga, changing his body to better suit their needs.  The Amadam doing extra work on that front as it tried to change his mind as well.

But he had to let it.  That was the unspoken arrangement.  He had to accept its logic, its kill-or-be-killed view of everything.  He would have to empty himself of compassion and empathy and everything that made him who he was.

He would have to stop regretting the lives he’d taken.

 

* * *

 

The locals called the mountain “Ebott”.  There was a big tourist trade building up around it even though the mountain itself had been closed off pretty heavily, all of it resulting from some poor, good-hearted kid finding a society of monsters—their word, not Godai’s—underneath it, trapped there by some ancient human curse since prehistory as the monster-folk who had emerged spoke of a great war that had ended when human sorcerers sealed them behind a barrier.

And it was through some weak point in Mt. Ebott that their human savior had appeared to lead them into the sun once again.

And something inside the mountain was what was calling him.

He had to laugh as he walked along the fence that, of course, the second hard-to-resist call would come from inside a mountain.  Most of the security was to keep looters or even just the curious from trying to take a piece of the monsters’ homes as some kind of souvenir or keepsake, but also to ensure that the only people who got in were the survey teams who had explored the massive cities underneath the planet’s crust or the anthropological (monstropological?) researchers the monsters’ ruling council and citizenry could agree upon.

Maybe it would, eventually, be re-opened, but the monsters had apparently suffered for geological ages away from the sky and all they wanted now was to be able to see the stars for a while.  He didn’t blame them for that.  Godai was a man who sometimes travelled out a desert, swam out to the middle of the ocean, or climbed an isolated mountain and would spend hours just staring up at a night sky nearly devoid of human-made light.  Not being able to do that?  It was unthinkable.

Funny how a little power made things that had once been impossible for him (or at least more expensive than his habits of discounted travel) seem like they were barely inconveniences.  Something else to think about.

He found a stretch of fence which seemed particularly isolated and vaulted over it.

Disturbing things wasn’t in the plan.  Of course, it never was, really, but still, something inside the mountain was calling to him.

It wasn’t even that hard a climb, the mountain’s primary hazards seeming to be wind, cold, and thin air; none of those were problems for Godai. Since he’d become Kuuga, his steps had become even surer, he was fairly sure he’d stopped needing to breathe, and the Amadam’s dire friction as it spun inside him the same way a tiger paces in its cage when it sees something it wants to eat, threatening always to set Godai and the world around him alight.

He found himself wishing he’d paid closer attention to the reports and thrown-together documentaries about where the monsters had come from, about the paths which had led them out of their world and into his.  A part of him, the Amadam, latched onto a stray thought that he could just punch his way in, but even if there was a call, no matter how insistent, there was always the risk of damaging whatever was on the other side, particularly if any monsters were left.  He was vaguely sure that it was just spiders now.  Even then, it would be a shame to bring down a mountain on a spider.  Wasn’t as if he had anything to fear from them.

Which was just the sort of thinking, he had to keep reminding himself, he was trying to avoid.  Feeling above or apart from people.  Never knew what it could end.  You started calling people monsters and realizing that made it easier to hurt them.  It was hard not to wonder if the monsters underneath Mt. Ebott weren’t the source for that on some deep, ancestral level.

The sight of the cave entrance interrupted his ruminations.  Looking at it, he realized he hadn’t seen many animals on the side of the mountain.  Surely something must be living there?  Yet the only things living on Mt. Ebott were plants or things that could fly. 

He would offer the observation if he ran across any of the explorers and see if they knew the reason, but for now, there was a call that he wanted to answer.

Inside the cave there was, as they’d said, a big hole; one you probably wouldn’t see if you weren’t paying attention or couldn’t see in the dark.  Eight people had fallen through it, they said.  The first child they believed would be the angel to lead them from the underground, six more whom the monsters had hunted in order to gain the power they’d need to break the barrier, and then that last one who had actually become the savior they had hoped for.

It was a lovely story.  The reason Godai hadn’t listened closer to it, hadn’t tried to write it on his soul was because if he heard a story of a child who really, absolutely, and without equivocation braved the worst magic the monsters could throw at him not with the power to endure, but with the strength to believe in people?

How could he live with himself?

Godai took a breath and hopped into the hole.

The way down was long.  Frighteningly so.  The Amadam was unafraid but Godai’s lizard brain just kept howling at him.  He did his best to keep his body loose, taking a breath and transforming into Kuuga, all pitch-black and gold armor, red segmented eyes glowing faintly in the dark, just falling and falling.

After what felt like forever, he hit the ground and rolled forward a little before getting back to his feet, transforming back into himself.  The call felt louder here, stronger.  Like a voice singing as much as calling to him.  Looking around, all he saw was a patch of well-tended golden-yellow flowers; though, curiously, there was a patch of bare earth in the middle of them, as if one of them had been dug up.

Godai knelt down to examine the patch and—

 

> _“You should smile more!” your mother said, her face splitting into a grin as if to demonstrate.  “You’re so serious!  Nobody will ever like you if you look so serious all the time!”_
> 
> _“I don’t really feel like smiling,” you told her, looking out the window at the mountain in the distance, “And what if I don’t care if they like me?”_
> 
> _She was glaring at you then.  You could feel it against the back of your head.  She hated you.  Just like all the rest of them, she **hated** you.  “I’m getting a little tired of your attitude, you know.  You’re sullen, then you’re smiling—“_
> 
> _“I thought you wanted me to smile,” you said, breaking into her sentence.  Your vision went red for a second as you felt her hand across the back of your head._
> 
> _“I want you to be **normal**.  Everything’s hot and cold for you and you never tell anyone why or give them any warning.  They’re starting to talk,” she explained as if that were explanation enough._
> 
> _It never was._
> 
> _“They’re always talking,” you said, “It’d be more interesting if they all just shut up.”_
> 
> _No slap this time.  She must be getting tired._
> 
> _“Just…  Stop looking at people like you do or they’ll feet you to the monsters.”_
> 
> _You scowled a bit, staring out the window.  There was no such thing as monsters.  Not any more, if there ever were.  You were too old to fall for that kind of baby nonsense.  But you wish they were real.  Wish they really were hiding in Mt. Ebott, asleep.  Just waiting to come out and shut them all up forever.  “Like what?” you ask, the question everyone hated having to answer because you knew, you **knew** they couldn’t describe it._
> 
> _“The one that makes them think you want to hurt them.”_
> 
> _“Which one’s that?”_
> 
> _“The one you make when you think nobody’s paying attention to you.  Just stop it.”_
> 
> _“Fine,” you said, sullen, and stretched a big wide smile on your face, “Better?”_

Godai stumbled back from the flowers, holding his head.  Something had just reached in and… “Hello?” he called out into the darkness, “Who… whoever you are, I’m here.”

Nothing answered.

But something moved.  A little flash of something out the corner of his eye, a glint of an eye behind a half-open door.  “Wait!” called Godai, but the figure was already gone.  He was fairly sure he could have caught it but he was the intruder here.  He was the danger.  The monsters, he’d heard, were half-immaterial, fragile.  Even a child could kill any one of them.  Though why… why that was the phrase they’d used had often confused him.

Why would a child _want_ to kill them?

Well, why did anybody want to kill anybody else?

 _You’re not ready yet,_ Daguva had said with a frustrated expression like a pouting child, _But after today, you will be!_  

Godai closed his eyes for a second.  Practice your breathing.  Practice being mindful of yourself.  But the only thing he felt was the Amadam spinning in his stomach, churning with a hope of confrontation, with the memory of the fight which had ensued the next day, with a memory of battle, of victo—

No, not victory.  He’d fought Daguva, but even if he had killed the immortal youth with his bare hands, he knew there was no victory to be had.

But in his dreams, he’d killed him.  Punched his grinning face until it was nothing but meat and bone and it wasn’t Kuuga’s hand doing it, not the Amadam.

He just wanted it to stop.  The memories, the hunger for violence, the truth that he was a murderer but he’d either been too stupid or too violent to see any other way, but on some level, in some horrible part of Godai, he knew that it felt

The call.  He couldn’t hear it.

The realization snapped him back to reality.  Something about the chamber with the flowers was playing with him, was dulling the call into silence for the first time since he’d heard it.  Godai took a moment to look around the room but, seeing no other entrance, he took a step toward the door and stepped

> _“We’re going,” your father told you.  From the way he said the words, you could tell it wasn’t a request but a fact.  He put his hand on your shoulder and pulled you away from the clay figures you’d been fashioning behind the house you shared.  The house was one of the finest in the village, bought and defended—as your father was so fond of saying—with blood and sweat, from glory in the bad old days when the world was young and magic was real and monsters roamed the Earth._
> 
> _“No,” you said, not caring how much of your father’s tone was echoed in your own voice as your hands formed another clay person, “I’m not going, father.”_
> 
> _You were brave to speak so to him.  He was a patient man but you knew that what he wanted to do was important to him and to his standing in the town.  You were holding him up.  If he did not arrive with you in tow, he would seem weak and you knew—you **knew** —there was nothing worse to be, nothing more shameful or humiliating, than to be seen as weak._
> 
> _“Get up,” he told you._
> 
> _You did not obey.  You were busy driving sticks through the chests of your clay people, your mind’s eye watching the sick red ooze out of them before you were pulled to your feet and you looked up at your father and he was stunned into silence, taking half a step back before grabbing your arm and pulling you away._
> 
> _In your mind’s eye, your half-destroyed clay village was burning and every last one of them was_

through.

Godai—he was Godai, he was still himself, even if he was also Kuuga—looked back at the doorway, head swimming, and reached down into his pack to check for his satellite phone.  There was probably no signal down this far, nowhere for the satellite to touch, but he needed to talk to someone, to hear Ichijou’s voice because he could feel himself on the edge of another transformation, on the edge of becoming Kuuga out of fear and he never, ever wanted to do that again.  The monster’s underworld had been emptied out, but there _were_ still spiders down here and even if they were just normal spiders instead of another breed of monster-person (he couldn’t let the word go unmodified, too many bad associations for him; associations he hoped to move past to let them have their name), the thought of Kuuga hunting them down and burning them to ashes, no matter how small their lives, was a horror.  Kuuga existed to erase, to un-make the world, to leave it a blackened, empty husk.

The same thing it begged him to do to himself.

Godai breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the satellite phone in his hand, about to pull it out when the sound of a voice stopped him.

“hey.”

Godai turned around to find nobody there.  The Amadam was almost giddy with anticipation, starting to spin inside him.  The man took a deep breath, “Are… you invisible or something?” he knew that wasn’t the case.  His senses weren’t as intensely honed as they were when he was Kuuga, but the changes the Amadam and Arcle had made to the way his brain perceived the world assured him that the speaker was not, in fact, invisible.  He would feel the way their body deflected the monstrous—no, the inhuman—energies of his aura, would hear their breathing, feel the way they disturbed the air.  But if it liked to talk, well, then maybe it was, what?  Shy?

“pft.  nah,” came the voice from behind him, the speaker gone when he turned toward the sound of the voice, “just don’t want you seein’ me just yet.  humans or whatever you are, they need a warning or they jump right outta their skin.  though that’s kind’ve an improvement.”  Behind Godai, the voice snickered a little.

“What are you warning me about?” he asked cautiously.

“that i’ve jumped outta mine.  like… like, seeing me will shock you a skele-ton,” another little laugh then, “so i’m throwing you a bone.”

Godai chuckled a little in spite of himself, staying still to avoid startling whoever it was, “What’s with all the terrible skeleton jokes?”

“just to loosen you up, buddy,” said the voice, “cuz i’m literally a skeleton, see, and I don’t want you, like, peeing yourself or nothin’.”

“Oh,” Godai said.  He wasn’t sure if it was stranger than he was, apparently, speaking to a talking skeleton or that the idea didn’t shock him as much as it should have.  “Like the ones on TV with the ambassador?”

“heh, yeah.  they’re a good kid,” the voice said before adding, “n’you can turn around now, i guess.  keep forgetting how many people seen me now.  not to mention, I really like my creepy act.”

Godai smiled a bit and turned around to face the skeleton-man.  He was stout, giving off an impression of heft despite his short stature, and dressed in a parka, basketball shorts, and slippers.  In his empty eye sockets, Godai could see tiny pinprick pupils like faraway stars looking up at him.  They blinked out for a second and he realized that those must be his eyes.  The whole effect would be comical if it weren’t so eerie.

The skeleton somehow managed to give the impression of grinning despite his lack of lips and held his hand out to Godai.  “pleased to meet you, buddy.  m’sans.”

Godai leaned down and took the skeleton’s hand, smiling a little.  However long the skeleton had been down here, he’d at least picked up a whole slew of Americanisms.  Godai was very happy that he’d had so many opportunities to improve his English in his travels.  “Godai Yuusuke.  Or just 'Yuusuke'.”  He reached into his pocket and retrieved one of his business cards, now proudly declaring that he, Godai Yuusuke, was a man with 3072 skills.

“cool,” said Sans, starlight eyes looking over the cards as if he understood Japanese (and maybe he did).  Then one of the skeleton’s eyes winked out and for a fraction of a second Godai could have sworn he saw the stars in those empty sockets go nova, a flare of green-blue light that left weird motion trail afterimages in Godai’s eyes, “so what brings you down here, Yuusuke?  get the feelin’ you’re a long way from home.”

The man couldn’t help but laugh as he gestured down the empty corridor beyond the skeleton, “Mind if I tell you on the way?  I think I have business a little deeper in.”

“nah,” replied Sans with a shrug, “always good to have a story while you get where you’re bone.”

Godai laughed a little, “You… don’t stop, do you?”

“sure i do,” the monster said with a shrug, “but only after my well’s run bone dry.”

The man stopped in his tracks.  “What?” he asked after Sans, but the skeleton just kept walking, looking back over his shoulder only once and Godai could feel the weight of the skeleton’s supernova-bright gaze staring at him, peering into the marrow of his soul. Then Sans turned back to the path ahead of him and raised an arm lazily as if to compel the man to follow.

“c’mon, Yuusuke!  i’m reheatin’ some'o my brother's spaghetti up at the house.  y’want some?”

Godai looked back to the patch of golden flowers in the tiny circle of sunlight from the world above for a moment and, in spite of himself, in spite of all the power at his disposal, in spite of the perfected Kuuga that begged to be released, he wondered if he would ever feel the sun on his face again.

 

> _The loud baby was quiet tonight because of you.  The one who kept you up at night, the one who screamed and screamed and screamed when you were tired and wanted to sleep.  Knowing it was going to be quiet forever now had put a rosy-cheeked smile on your face, just like your mother wanted._
> 
> _But it made her afraid, that smile.  Which was funny, because you were just giving her what she wanted._
> 
> _She made you feel powerless when she told you to just put up with that loud baby, the loud baby who was stealing your sleep and taking something nice away from you.  Then she lied to you and said she hated it, too, but it was just one of those things.  You knew she didn’t hate it.  She didn’t hate it at all, because if you were tired, you did what she said.  That’s what she thought, even though she lied and said you were wrong when you told her so._
> 
> _Your father just asked you to play out in the flowers for a little.  You almost didn’t because even though you were going to do that anyway, doing it because he told you to, because he wanted you out of the house because he hated you?  It made you feel weak when you were the strong one._
> 
> _And you’d proved it twice now.  Before the baby was quiet, you slipped a plant from the fenced-in garden behind the apothecary's house into the food of a bigger kid, one who made you feel small whenever he walked by, who ignored you and didn’t invite you to things and told people about that time he caught you pulling wings off of flies.  You honestly didn’t know what would happen, but making him eat something he didn't intend would have been thrill enough, just because you made him do it.  But when he got sick and had yet to come back to school, felt even better._
> 
> _You leaned close to examine your little patch of golden flowers, squeezing any aphids or other killer bugs that might have climbed onto them, combing through the flower patch one at a time to keep them clean and safe.  They were your friends.  When nobody else would listen to you, you knew they would.  When nobody else would play with you, you could play around them.  You imagined the magical kingdoms that might live inside them, the magical kingdoms you would one day escape to.  You imagined being crowned king of that place then sending your army back to your stupid, normal, ugly life and trampling it underfoot. Some days, you could almost hear the crackling fire and the screaming lamentations._
> 
> _As you stared at the flowers, you heard your mother and father fighting.  And so close to the window that the neighbors might hear.  What would people **think**?  You were smiling now, the thought of hurting her with those words, of shutting her up with her own stupid sentence, making you genuinely happy._
> 
> _“They don’t understand,” your father was saying.  About you.  Like you were stupid.  You were young, yes, but you weren’t stupid.  You understood everything._
> 
> _“Yes, they do,” your mother said, looking back at you and you smiled wider for her and she took a step away from you as if afraid.  Good.  “They understand perfectly. They just don't **care** ”_
> 
> _“They’re our **child**.  They couldn’t have done this.”_
> 
> _“But they **did**.  I can’t prove it, but they did and what are we going to do?  I don’t want to send my own flesh and blood to judgement, but—“  _
> 
> _She broke off to comfort your father as he sobbed.  He made you feel weak so often just by being so big, but listen to him now, sobbing. Weak._
> 
> _But you were smart enough to know that they were going to try and punish you, to make you feel small and weak and powerless.  So you ran before they could come to get you, to do whatever it was they were planning on doing._
> 
> _You thought you saw something up on the mountain once. A patch of golden flowers growing wild. The path to it was easy.  You could hide there and when you returned, they would be so worried and you would have made them worried. And if they weren't, you would hurt them with their callousness. No reason not to because you won no matter what._


	3. Part II: Judgement

 “—there?”

Godai gasped, panting a little as his head whipped around, swallowing a bit. 

“Yuusuke?” It was Sans, shaking the man a little, “You okay there?”  Godai didn’t have presence of mind to appreciate how funny it was that the surest sign that he’d come back to reality was that an animated skeleton was shaking him awake.

“What?  Oh, I…” Godai shook his head to clear it, trying to remember whatever it was that he’d just seen, whatever he’d just felt, whatever it was that was screaming into his senses. “…I don’t know.  There’s something... I don’t know.  Like an echo of a dream or…”

The skeleton nodded as if that explained things, “Makes sense, yeah.  You get used to ‘em.  Lot fewer people so the echoes of what’s stayed can be a little heavier.”

“What’s stayed?”

Sans shrugged a little, “Lotta stuff, really.  Maybe it’s just some old echo of something that happened.  They run thick around here.”

“And they just grab you like that?”

“Yeah.  At least mine do.”

“Really?”

“Y’know what?” Sans said as he clapped the man on the back, pushing him toward a doorway, “You’re probably just hungry.  I’m serious about that spaghetti.  My brother’s recipe.  Best stuff in the world.  Clear your head right up.”

Godai still wanted to ask what the skeleton meant, to explain how he didn’t actually need food, to explain that the thing that let him get down so easily and safely, the Amadam, kept him alive no matter what.  But the doorway ahead suddenly filled with spikes as Sans chuckled, muttering something about admiring the professional movers who’d reset the traps when they took all the stuff.

Sans had guided Godai through a short, strange labyrinth, sometimes asking Godai to hit some switches marked with day-glow yellow paint as they passed through and leading the man along twisting paths on floors covered with spikes.  Traps, it seemed, were something of an art form for the monsters.  There was also theatre, TV, novels, film, sculpture, painting, and the rest, but there were also traps.  More specifically, puzzle traps.  The kind of things you saw in old American pulp media, seemingly arbitrary sets of switches, block-pushing, and the like.

“It seems a bit…”

“nah, you can say it.  It’s dumb.  But we had a lot of underground and a king who wanted us to catch him some humans, so… traps.”

“Why did he want to capture humans?”

“to kill ‘em.”

Godai went pale, following watching as Sans flipped a blue switch on the floor with his slipper-clad foot.

Sans looked up at Godai as another door opened beyond him, “Messed up, right?  But he’s the king.  Sweet guy, but to save his people?  Yeah, he killed a few humans.”

“How could killing people save anyone?” Godai asked under his breath, wondering why the king could ever get such a thought into his head.  He barely had time to formulate the thought before he realized he knew.  He knew very well how such a thought came about.

When he looked up, Sans was looking over his shoulder at the man and Godai could have sworn he saw a blue-green flame in one of the skeleton’s eyes.  The power of that fire made him take an involuntary step back while, in his stomach, the Amadam roiled within him, howling for transformation, for a chance to fight one of these monsters.

Sans looked away again, shrugging as he gestured Godai to follow after him, passing by a great, gnarled black tree.  “S’always the question, huh?”

The pair of them walked in silence under a massive, imposing archway and into, of all things, what looked like a posh, if abandoned, middle-class home.  There was a wide hallway, a stairway to a lower floor.  At one end of the hallway, he saw a few doors, at the other, what had once been a wide, comfortable living room.  He could see the shadow on the wall of what must once have been a bookcase, the wear on the carpet around the indentations of a large chair.

Finally, Sans brought Godai into the kitchen where the microwave was just beeping that it was done.

“talk about timing,” said the skeleton as he pulled a couple dishes from the microwave and handed one to Godai.

Sans slid onto the floor with the plate in his lap, handing Godai a fork, which the man accepted gratefully.  No reason to spit on someone’s hospitality, especially since, honestly, he had such a bad feeling about this place.  The call was painfully strong the deeper he went into the underground, drawing him deeper in; so a chance to not think about it for a few minutes and to learn something new about the world in the process?  It was nice.

Besides which, he was a bit afraid to find out what it was.  Things were… they were strange down here.  Which was saying something for a man who’d fought legions of mons—of cruel humans bent on doing massive harm to the world and met his fictitious other-self from another world, who had died three times and been revived, hale and whole, by the angry living rock in his torso.

He was drawing a forkful of the pasta to his mouth as Sans held up his hand, “Careful,” the skeleton said, “it’s still pretty hot.”

Godai stifled a laugh, just shrugging at Sans.  “I don’t mind.”

The skeleton grinned, “Then bone appetit.”

The human didn’t stifle that laugh, just shaking his head once the initial laugh was over and taking a bite of the pasta.  It was actually quite good!  With an appreciative look on his face, he said, “Your brother made this?”

“ayup.”

“Your brother’s a really good cook.”

“yeah,” said Sans, somehow managing to convey a wistful smile despite the lack of skin or muscles on his face, “Papyrus is pretty much the coolest.”

The look on the skeleton’s face reminded Godai that when he got back to Japan, he should have Minori over.  Maybe do a month or so at his uncle’s café.  “You know, if you ever come to Japan, I should introduce you to my uncle.”

“Yeah?” chuckled the skeleton, “Why’s that?”

“He’s pretty cool, too, but mostly I just think you’d appreciate his sense of humor.”

“It’s that bad, huh?”  The lights in Sans’ eyes slid upward as if rolling self-consciously, “Sounds great.  I’ll make sure to look it up if I’m ever

 

 

> _Godai was eight years old and standing over another boy, the boy staring up at him, shocked, with a big red mark on his cheek where Godai had hit him.  Godai was panting hard and shaking with anger and adrenaline._
> 
> _“Don’t you **ever** talk about my mom!” he howled at the boy as he descended on him, fists flying.  He didn’t know what he was doing, he just wanted all the pain and helplessness and frustration inside of him to not be there anymore and this boy, a new kid who couldn’t have known better, had said something stupid about Godai’s mom._
> 
> _He would have ignored it any other day, hunkered down the way he usually did, become quiet and sullen and looked out the window because he didn’t want to do this.  He didn’t want to fight._
> 
> _But his mom was dead and she was going to be dead forever and his baby sister Minori never stopped crying and his dad never stopped crying and he’d had to stop crying because he didn’t want to get made fun of anymore and this boy had made a joke, a stupid, stupid joke but it had just set everything off and—_
> 
> _Ms. Misato, his teacher, grabbed him and pulled him away from the other boy.  His teacher fixed him with a look and went to go check on the other boy._
> 
> _Now the other boy was crying.  His hurts were all visible and he was crying hard and the teacher was consoling him and went to take the boy to the school nurse, but not before telling Godai to head back to the classroom and stay there._
> 
> _With a sick feeling in his stomach, Godai did as he was told.  In his head, he just replayed and replayed the look on the other boy’s face, the one Godai had put there and he just felt sicker and sicker because the other boy looked how he felt.  Now he just knew that Ms. Misato was going to call his dad and his life would be_

over— hey, you okay?”

“I don’t know…” Godai murmured, rubbing at his head as, inside him, the Amadam began to spin as if it hoped to grind away at the shell that contained it.  Godai put the pasta aside and shook his head to clear it.  “I… I’m really sorry, Sans.  I think it’s the thing that’s calling me, I don’t think I can—“

Sans just slumped forward a little as if deflating, “never enough time…”

“What?”

Sans stood up and looked at Godai for a second before gesturing over his shoulder to the hallway.  “Look, I know you got a thing you gotta do, but I got a thing I gotta do before you do what you gotta do.”

Godai moved to get to his feet, looking down at Sans curiously, “What are you talking about?”

“Look, buddy, I'm here now because of you.”

Godai just stared down at the skeleton, confused.

Sans let out a sigh and gestured to the hall again, “Bottom of the stairs, there’s a path that’ll take you to the rest of the underworld, but I made a promise that I’d keep an eye on any human that came down here.  But I also got an idea what’s waiting out there and before you go out there… aw, geez…”  The skeleton spent a second trying to find the words before looking up at the man, “Look, I got two jobs down here.  First is to look after humans, right?  Second, though?” The stars in his eye sockets disappeared, but one of them was replaced with that burning supernova eye that stared up at Godai, its flames as cold as Kuuga’s were hot.  The Amadam churned within him as if trying to pull him toward a confrontation.  “Second job says that anybody that’s a threat to the royal family’s gotta be **judged** before they go anywhere near ‘em. ”

“Well… I’m not planning on going near them?  Besides, I thought I heard your King and Queen had integrated pretty well into their new life up top?”

Sans’ face resumed its normal ease as he shrugged, “Yeah, I know.  But they had a couple kids, see.  Both dead, but…” the skeleton looked back over his shoulder as if he heard something behind him.  

Godai listened for it, too.  It was a tiny sound, like fingers knocking and scratching at a massive stone door and the sound was the call and hearing the call so crystal clearly made his Amadam sing and

 

 

> _Godai was crying in the strangers’ living room, standing just barely behind his father.  When his father heard about what had happened, he talked to Ms. Misato and got the other boy’s name and phone number and arranged for the awkward confrontation they were having now._
> 
> _Some of the other boys had clapped him on his back, had told him they’d be doing the same or worse to that kid for talking like that about Yuusuke’s dead mother.  He begged them not to, to just leave it be.  It wasn’t like they were serious (at least he hoped not) but the look on the other boy’s face just wouldn’t leave him and the thought of it getting worse just made him feel sicker._
> 
> _They thought he’d won.  Said he’d beat the other kid.  Godai didn’t have the words to say that they were wrong, but his father sure did.  Just staring down at Yuusuke and lecturing him and he couldn’t do anything but agree because it **was** inexcusable, it **was** a terrible thing to do to somebody, it **was** terrible and he just wanted that bad feeling to go away._
> 
> _His father had been pleased at that._
> 
> _The boy’s mother called him into the room.  He looked afraid of Yuusuke and Yuusuke understood why.  The other boy’s face was red all over and one of his eyes was swollen shut and there was a little wince when he moved one of his arms wrong._
> 
> _“Yuusuke,” his father said, “I believe you have something to say to Akira?”_
> 
> _Yuusuke wiped at his eyes as a flood of words spilled out of his mouth, “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have hit you, I won’t do it again, I promise, and you can hit me back as much as you want if it will make you feel better, and I just so sorry and I wish I could take it back because I don’t like doing that and please I’m so sorry, I’m so so sorry!” He would have kept going but tears cut his words short._
> 
> _The other boy, Akira, nodded and said, “A-and I’m sorry, too.  I didn’t know about your mom.  My mom told me and if that happened to me and someone said stuff about my mom…” the boy shook his head and wiped at his eyes as well._
> 
> _Godai’s father let out a sigh and touched Yuusuke’s shoulder, pulling Yuusuke back some to let him cry in peace behind him.  Godai heard them talking about what happened, about how sorry he was.  They were sorry, too._
> 
> _His father carried him home on his shoulders, the way he hadn’t done in years, not since he started getting called away all the time on business.  “I’m really proud of you, Yuusuke,” the man said, looking up at the sniffling boy._
> 
> _“You shouldn’t be.  I was really mean to Akira and I never wanna be that way again.”_
> 
> _“Then you’ve learned something really important today.”  Mr. Godai reached up to pick his son up and toss him playfully into the air, “You’re becoming a man and just the kind of big brother your little sister needs.”_
> 
> _Godai hadn’t remembered how much he loved the sensation of being tossed up like that, the feeling of ease, of flight and falling and trust cutting through the hurt of the past few months and_

“Yeah,” said Sans, watching Godai fold onto the ground, clutching at his head.  “See, that thing out there, maybe it’s not their adopted kid anymore, maybe it’s just a thing that used to be that kid, but I still got my job.  It's bigger than alive or dead, you know?  You go out there like you are now, open to it? It’ll tear you apart.  And I don’t know what it is that makes you so powerful, but I can’t let you go out there and dump it into that thing’s hands.”

“Why… why aren’t you stopping it?” Godai asked, watching the skeleton as he tried to catch his breath.  He shouldn’t need to, but he hadn’t thought about that day in decades.  But that sick feeling?  The horror that someone was hurt and he was the cause?  That never quite left.  Especially not now.

Sans snorted a little, shrugging, “Buddy, if I could, I’d do it in a heartbeat.  But that thing?  Powerful enough to call you from halfway ‘round the globe and no matter how many times any of us go after it, it either eludes or kills us.  It’s…”  he trailed off before looking up at Godai.  “It wants you here.  And that means you should just leave.  We’ll meet up later, I’ll introduce you to Papyrus, it’ll be great.”

Godai frowned down at Sans.  He made sense, but…

“What’s this ‘judgement’?”

Sans was quiet for a moment before speaking again, his eyes like stars that were even farther away, his voice grown cold and massive as the sea, the lights of the house thrumming in tune with them, “i'll look into your SOUL, read your **Level Of ViolencE** and your **EXecution Points**.  then i read your heart to see who want to be. then i read your life to see who you've hurt. "

Godai's brow furrowed as his eyes watched the skeleton's burning supernova eye for a second before letting out a sigh, "At least you're thorough... Then what happens?"

" **You will be judged.** ”

Godai let the words land in his head.  They were some odd ways of talking about those things, but he felt he understood the gist of it.  “I… I thought it was supposed to be a jackal who did this part.”

Sans’ face went back to normal then, “Yeah, well, he moved out.  Hear he got a new biz' in Baja.”

The human chuckled before a nauseous grimace crossed his features as he felt the Amadam stirring inside him at the potential of something attacking him, at the laughable idea of something challenging it.  It begged for judgement, begged to transform and show this tiny skeleton-thing what a trial looked like.  Which was why Godai, instead, asked, “Is there any other way?”

“Through me?  No.  But, look, there’s **always** another way to go.  You could just choose not to do this.  Turn around, go home.  The call probably goes away.  Eventually.  It’ll pick a new target.  You keep wondering what I would’ve said but… well, you’ve seen and done enough already.  I can see that just lookin’ at you.  You don’t seem like much for throwin’ a punch even though I bet you’re amazing at it.  And, hey, bet once the call goes away, you probably won’t even care.  Other stuff’ll come up.  You pop back over to me and Papyrus’ place every couple years for a couple rounds of ball and I bet I’ll have a new favorite bar.  We’ll forget all about it and be weird sometimes when you wonder how I would’ve judged you way back when, but you’ll put it out of your head ‘cause we’re pals and you don’t wanna risk having to fight me, even for some kind of cosmic epiphany peace of mind. ”

“And if I do?”

“Hard to say, buddy.  Maybe we have to fight.  My job makes it so I’m pretty good at fighting.  Good enough to kill a human or two.  Even if it’s never really done any good.”

Godai grimaced some in agreement, “It never does.  And… I hope it won’t come to that.”

“Me, too, bud,” replied the skeleton, sliding his hands into the pockets of his parka, “But judgement, y’know.  It’s no game.  I go hard on that.”

Godai was silent for a few seconds, seconds in which he could feel Sans praying that he would change his mind, that he would just **leave** , or at least decide that all this danger wasn’t worth it.  “Then I guess…”

 

> _Number 42 had just made Godai truly understand what the Grongi were and what they were after._
> 
> _For the past eight and a half months, the Grongi had been killing and killing and killing their way all over Japan, finding increasingly bizarre and specific methods of killing people.  For the past eight and a half months, Godai, as Kuuga (or, as the police department called him, Number 4), had been running to try and keep up with them, hoping each time that the creature he killed would be the last of them, that the nightmare would be over, that people could go back home, go back to their lives.  All he wanted was to know that people could have enough security in their lives that they could find a reason to smile._
> 
> _And it was all easier before he understood what the Grongi wanted.  It shouldn’t have been, but it was.  When they were mysterious, alien creatures, killing at random for reasons that defied explanation as part of some hideous, otherworldly plan, it was manageable.  He could follow them.  He could fight them.  He could do his best to stand between their cold, alien cruelty and their intended victims.  Even when he learned it was a **game** of all things, there was still some idea that they were twisted in some way, that calling it a game was being reductive, was making it less than it was, that it was actually some massive and complex ideology and they were serving it.  They wanted some **thing**.  They had to.  Maybe they started their sick game because they thought they were the people who actually deserved to live in Japan?  Maybe it was because at the end they thought they got a wish?   Did they have a god they worshipped who commanded the game be done and they were all just religious fanatics?_
> 
> _But then he saw 42 at work and he truly understood._
> 
> _The reason was the simplest thing in the world, made all the more horrible because of how pure it was._
> 
> _They killed people because it was fun._
> 
> _They enjoyed it so much, they’d had to make up rules or else they’d kill all the pieces of their game and have no one left to kill except each other and while that, too, seemed to be a part of their society, they seemed to view humans as better targets because they were weak._
> 
> _The rules clearly showed that they were meant to kill on large scales, in spectacular ways, or both, almost universally those who had no way of seeing it coming.  At least until Number 42._
> 
> _They had built an entire society upon this.  That was all they wanted to be because killing was all they wanted in the world._
> 
> _But even that much did not explain the glee on Number 42’s face as it terrorized its final intended victim.  It hadn’t been enough that dozens of young men, believing they were to be his next victim, killed themselves rather than let 42 get to them.  It hadn’t been enough that whole families had to know or believe they were going to lose their child.  It wasn’t enough to kill all the police protecting the last intended victim.  42 had to laugh while he did it.  He’d killed 90 people, stolen away their lives and their futures and he was laughing while he did it._
> 
> _A pure laugh, a wild laugh, with a pure joy in it Godai had never heard before (though would hear again)._

Sans held up a finger then, saying, “One last thing, though, before you decide.”

Sans’ voice pulled Godai back into reality and thank goodness.  “What is it?”  He felt sick that whatever it was, this thing which had used to be one of the royals was adept at latching onto memories of violence.  He wondered if he could fight it as Kuuga or… or if it was just trying to understand him.

The skeleton shrugged again, his gaze pleading, “I don’t know if what I think is callin’ you is what’s actually doing it.  But if it is?  I don’t think you’re gonna be happier if you go meet it.  You go to fight it, you gotta go fight this thing that looks like a little kid.  Maybe you gotta live with killing this thing that you'll never be sure wasn't a little kid.  And, heck, maybe you gotta kill me to get to it, y’know?  Maybe I’ll look at you and see everything inside you and I’ll hate you so much, I won’t give up ‘til one of us has to die.  Maybe that would be right.”

Godai inclined his head some, “Maybe it would be.”

“Yeah, but, see, I don’t wanna do it.  I especially don’t wanna hafta use my special attack on you.” Sans seemed flippant now but he was only seeming so.  Even without flesh on his face, even without muscles, he could see that the skeleton was anxious.

Godai was not half the student of body language that Ichijou was, but he knew what it looked like when someone was grasping for any kind of purchase in hopes of putting off something they didn’t want to do.  It’s why he never graduated from Jounan, in fact.  He chuckled a little, all the same.  It sounded silly when you just called it a ‘special attack’.  Didn’t sound much less so when they found better names for them. “You have a special attack?”

“You-ske better believe it.  It’s Sans-sational.”

Godai laughed at that.  The first one had been bad enough, but the second?  He laughed and laughed and wished the Amadam didn’t seek out, soothe, and strengthen any muscle that was in pain almost before the pain could register because he would have wanted to stop before he started crying, before his hands were on Sans’ shoulders and the skeleton was looking up at him with that same pleading expression. He wished a pain in his stomach would make him stop.  Instead the roiling of the thing right beside his stomach tried to make him do it more.  Laugh until he went insane and just started swinging.  Laughing and crying and screaming as he turned the world to ash.

“B-but I’ve… ” Godai sputtered as he straightened back up, wiping at his face and looking down at the monster, “Sans, I’ve done some awful stuff. I’m a ki—“

Sans held his hand up then, somehow managing to screw his face up tight, eye sockets going dark as he sighed, “Yeah. We all are down here, come down to it.  Directly or indirectly.  I've done a ton of stuff I wish I hadn't. Even if it doesn't count, even if I was ordered to do it, even if it didn't 'really' happen..."  He grimaced at himself and Godai saw him slump, resigned. "You wanna know if that's who you really are, right?  If you're the guy who did the things or the guy who kept going after just hatin' himself for doin' 'em, right?  Then you wanna find someone who likes you enough they’re willin’ to put you down if that’s what you got comin’.”

“Yeah,” sniffed Godai. "Sounds horrible when you put it like that."

“That's because it **is** horrible. Besides, " Sans huffed, "isn’t there someone else who should be doin’ this?”

Godai looked at the skeleton for a moment before letting out a sigh.  “Yes.  But he’s back in Japan and I want… And I need to know what’s calling me.  It's lost, whatever it is.  Lost in a darkness I can't...  I need to help it."  He let out a sigh, staring down at the plate of spaghetti and trying not to laugh at the horrible unlikeliness of it all.  "A-and if I can… can just be done with having to wonder if I’m a man or… or Kuuga, my life would be… I don’t know.  Better.”

“That sort of thinking’ll kill you,” muttered Sans, staring at the floor, “I mean it, Yuusuke, it **will** kill you if you have to know stuff like that.  Maybe it’d be nice to know, but it’s probably just a big ol’ pile of pain.  Chasing curiosity's a sucker's game.  Better to just use your imagination. ”

“Yeah," Godai agreed with a shrug, "You're probably right.”

“So… so you’re gonna turn back?”

“No.  It’s so easy to talk about what’s necessary, but… I want to answer that call, Sans.  And everything that comes with it.  I have to know if I’m…”

“A monster?”

“We need new words.”

Sans smirked a little, snorting.  “Do you ever.”

“So, come on.  Let’s…  I submit myself to your judgement.”

The skeleton let out a long sigh then.  “I was afraid you’d say that.  Any last words?  Throw yourself on the mercy of the court?”

“Just that I guess it’s a good day to Godai.” It was hard to make the joke but, somehow, it seemed appropriate.

“heh.  You’re alright, buddy.”  Sans took a deep breath, “Hope it’s good news.”

“Me, too.”

And Sans’ supernova eye opened and all the color, the light, the warmth, everything but Godai, the darkness, and Sans was wiped away.  The kitchen was gone, the floor was gone, the mountain was gone. Godai felt the eye burning into him, freezing his bones, turning his blood to ice, even seeming to slow the Amadam’s furious revolutions in a case of ice the blue-green of an exploding star.

“your **Level Of ViolencE** is through the roof.  so’re your **EXecution Points** ,” Sans said, his face growing harder, “Higher than I thought they’d be.  You’re a beast, Godai Yuusuke.”

Godai inclined his head in rueful agreement.

Then there was a stabbing feeling, like an icicle being shoved into his still-beating heart, “Now, your heart and the pain you've caused others...”

 

> _He’d fought 42 from one end of the city to another and 42 always escaped him and after it finally killed that last kid, it had kept laughing and Godai wanted to tell himself he’d let the Amadam do what it wanted, let it take the reins of Godai’s body, let it become Kuuga as it wanted to._
> 
> _But that wasn’t true._
> 
> _His heart had grabbed hold of the Amadam and leaned hard into not only the power it gave him as Kuuga, but into the kind of cruel, spirit-breaking violence it wanted to inflict on those who crossed the body it rested in.  It did not have to stoke the flames of hatred inside of Godai because even without the power of the Amadam, he would have loathed the Grongi.  It did not have to subtly encourage him to attack harder because he’d wanted nothing but to mash the creature into pulp.  He could feel 42’s resolve imploding under the barrage of his fists and when he felt the Grongi’s hot blood on his knuckles, he was ferociously glad in a way he’d never been before._
> 
> _He always told himself, after, that it was just that he’d seen so many of those kids’ friends and families weeping, that it was that particular brand of horror-movie sadism that had got such a rise out of him, that he was tired of all the fighting and those were all true, but it was also true that he would have beat the life out of 42 with Kuuga’s bare hands had he not remembered almost at the last minute that when he did so, it would explode and likely kill everyone in the area._
> 
> _Including Ichijou.  Ichijou had seen him like that.  Had seen him give in to the belt.  His senses had caught the sound of the man cocking his revolver to put Godai down like a rabid dog once 42 was dead._
> 
> _He tossed 42 aside and called Gouram, the ancient living horse armor, onto his motorcycle and rammed 42 as he tried to run away and drove him out of town, to the nearest body of water he could find._
> 
> _And that was where he gave in to the Amadam.  Where he accepted its logic.  Where he truly became Kuuga, even if all the changes to Kuuga’s carapace armor would come later, that was the moment because he’d shifted into Kuuga’s purple Titan form, produced the Titan’s blade and as a single mind, he and the Amadam impaled 42 and Godai felt a sense of pitch-black peace as the Grongi exploded beneath him, bathing Godai in hate and flame and Amadam’s approval._
> 
> _It had not lasted._
> 
> _But he always knew—always—that it was only a matter of time before he became something unspeakable because for the life of him, even though he knew that 42 was a real person with goals, ambitions, and a life, he wasn’t sorry 42 was dead.  He was only sorry that Godai himself had been the one who’d killed him.  And even then, only because he didn't like killing; not because he wasn't happy that he had been the one to stop him from hurting anyone else ever again._

The sensation of Sans’ examination of his heart was the worst of it.

Then, all at once, the cold of Sans’ gaze was gone, leaving Godai panting and clutching at his chest.  “You’ve killed people, Yuusuke.  Maybe it’d be different if you thought they were monsters, if you thought they were things unlike you, but you didn’t.  You knew.  You _always_ knew. ”

Godai was silent.

Sans stared up at him, nova gaze burning cold, “So do whatever it is you do to get ready to fight.”

The world around Godai became still and even untransformed, he felt massive, impossible powers groaning to life just outside his field of vision. The pitch black unlight of Sans' judgement felt as if it were choking him, bearing down on him with an incalculable weight of potential violence, violence to which the Amadam was eager to respond. He didn't want to indulge it. And... and besides, this was judgement. He had asked for this. To be weighed, to be judged, to be known and to finally no longer need to wonder what his actions had made him because, living or dead, he would **know**.

Then a thing, a face like a dragon’s skull, made of bone-white light appeared in the unlight of the room.  Then another.  Four more, steam rising up from their mouths as Sans looked on, expression as cold as his gaze.  “Nice knowin’ ya, bud.”

Six blasts of freezing energy sapped at his strength and he felt his flesh turning black and flaking away and he knew he should just take it and let the blast strip him to the bones, denying the Amadam a host and returning it, more or less, where Godai had found it: the darkness under a mountain.

He should have just let it kill him.

But it hurt.  It hurt too much and it was too cold and he couldn’t think and he was pretty sure his face was being peeled away by knives of ice and he released the Amadam just that much as his senses suddenly exploded to flaming life again as his body became Kuuga once more.  Almost invisible in the absolute darkness but for its glowing red eyes and firey gold trim.

“Well, how ‘bout that,”  murmured Sans as he recalled the ghostly dragon skulls, “We both shoulda known you’d try to fight it, but I kinda hoped you’d just **die** and we could be done. ”

Kuuga was silent as Godai wrapped himself around the Amadam to keep Kuuga still while inside its vantablack carapace, Godai’s body repaired itself. 

There was a weird shift in the Arcle belt, the Amadam inside it howling as its power was restrained.  “Little something to help me aim,” Sans said as Godai felt Kuuga shrink half a head, carapace flaring from jet black to a bold red.  The form the ancient texts described as “mighty”, his first fully-realized Kuuga incarnation.  And in the pitch-black of the room, he was hard to miss, especially under the spotlight of Sans' gaze.

“Real sorry, bud, but I can see it in you. Even if you didn’t see another choice with all those people you murdered, that bloodlust’s in you. It's like when a tiger tastes human blood; always gonna know you bleed and that you can be eaten. Maybe it doesn't eat you today, but...” Sans shrugged sadly and gestured with one hand.

Godai had barely enough time to think about it before he felt a rumbling in the ground as spikes made of or at least styled like bones shot up out of the ground and the dragon skulls returned.  Godai threw himself backwards, vaulting onto his hands, back onto his feet back onto his hands as he backflipped away from the energy blasts. 

“good moves,” came Sans’ voice, “how ‘bout this?”  Suddenly Godai felt the Arcle lurch and the power slid out of his arms and into his legs.  Blue Kuuga, the dragon.  Godai crouched, preparing to spring as Sans smirked, holding out his hand.  “See, we both know you’ll never give it up.  You got too much pride, too much stuff you wanna do, and the knowledge that you’re an unstoppable deathgod is too much of a powertrip for you.  You just keep busy to keep from going to sleep like you know you should. Keep pretending you're this put-upon hero guy when you're just another killer.”

With the barest upward motion, Sans seemed to make gravity invert and Godai slammed face-first into the ceiling, barely able to leap up toward the ceiling as more bone spikes shot out from the ceiling as if attacking him. They were attacking him! How was Sans doing this?

The spikes began to retract above him as he began falling back up onto th—

Sans’ hand shifted to the left and Godai slammed, hard, into the bone-spikes lining the wall.  Godai was, for not the first time, glad for how durable even the frailest of Kuuga’s forms were. The bones broke before Godai did. 

“Well, come on, killer!” howled Sans, “'Kill or be killed', right?  Isn’t that what things like you are **for**? ”

Sans’ hand shifted again, differently this time, and Godai’s head was flooded with noise.  It should have been baffling but he was so used to it now that it only took him a second to re-adjust; just in time to dodge out of the way of a flurry of energy spears, moving himself to avoid each spear in kind, knocking some away before, finally, catching hold of one.  The Arcle channeled the Amadam’s power into the spear but it was too far a cry from a projectile weapon to become the crossbow of the green Pegasus form.

“Stole my friend’s best move, but you’re still alive, huh?  Hope she doesn’t find out…” a little chuckle as Sans twisted his hand again and suddenly the world was three lanes, all three filled with the dragon skulls, opening their mouths to blast him again.  Godai wanted to move beyond those three lanes but somehow they were everything in the universe and he was the purple Kuuga again, the Titan.  He snapped off the bottom half of the spear and the Arcle flared to life, transforming the bladed tip of the spear into a sword. Leaning into the flat of the blade, Godai leaned into the blast of cold power the dragon in his lane loosed at him, deflecting the power up and out of the pitch-black unworld Sans' judgement had created.  “Not like this!" Godai shouted as he stumbled forward and the energy dissipated along with the rest of the three lanes, "Don’t attack me in pieces or I’ll fight back!  I might kill you, Sans!  And if I don’t, **Kuuga** will!  Don’t make me defend myself! Don't give me the chance! You have to stop me! Head and belt! Do it!”

“I’m not **making** you do jack! ” Sans cursed and twisted his hand. "You **always** have a choice. "

Kuuga was red again and free to move as a column of made of bones flew at him.  His senses were comparatively dull but he could find the barely-there nooks and crannies to dive into; so he did.  It was tight, all of it was tight, but at the speed they were going, it was hard to do anything but keep dodging, hard to even think about anything but the fact that he was weakened and even if he could take quite a few hits from those things, even with the Amadam’s regenerative powers, there was a limit to what Godai could do. But maybe that was the point. Maybe that was what he deserved.

Sans certainly didn't seem to have a problem with what he was doing.

Godai was about to call out to Sans when he saw the skeleton’s hand drop and the Amadam surge to life again, filling him with the unholy strength of the pitch-black Kuuga as Sans lept high into the air, pulling back his fist as one of the ghostly dragon-skulls manifested around it.  Godai imagined this to be Sans’ ‘special attack’; after all, it looked pretty spectacular. Sans-sational, even.

“Prepare to get **got**! ”

Kuuga’s senses made it seem like it lasted an eternity and the Amadam tried to pull him from the ground, to make Godai leap up and plant his foot straight in the skeleton’s face; it was quite sure the impact and resultant misfiring of energies would make for an amazing explosion.  Better still, the dire logic of the Amadam teased in his mind, there was nobody living down here to get hurt in that explosion.

Sans meant to kill him. 

Good.

 

 

> _The Amadam was cracked.  So was the other one’s.  No flame.  No armor.  Just fists._
> 
> _Imperfect.  But serviceable._
> 
> _Amadam throbbed with hate and Godai jerked in place, flaring back to life as the snow evaporated around him, weak limbs leaden with trauma and Godai howled his frustration and his empty heart, struggling to climb back to his feet, to be Kuuga again, to make the other one, the other Amadam-bearer, feel his powerlessness.  The Amadam tried in vain to pump fresh hate into Godai’s twitching muscles to make the Godai get to its feet and finish the job before the other one did so._
> 
> _There was a soft crunch-crunch-crunch sound as the weak thing Godai brought placed its foot on the other Amadam-bearer’s chest as he writhed and howled and laughed and spat abuse up at the man._
> 
> _BANG_
> 
> _BANG_
> 
> _The Godai was momentarily deafened and Amadam tried to make it pull its eyes away from the other Amadam-bearer because the sight of the thing with its head half-obliterated would only rouse the Godai and_
> 
> _Godai blinked a couple times, panting and staring up at Ichijou. He didn’t dare to take a second look at Daguva._
> 
> _“Godai Yuusuke!” Ichijou barked, calmly loading two more of the nerve-destroyer bullets into his revolver, “Wake up!”_
> 
> _He wanted to cry, but he was too tired.  Too tired to move, too tired to cry, too tired to sleep.  He felt his mouth moving a little as he stared up at the man.  The wind erased his first attempts to speak to the man._
> 
> _“Once more!” Ichijou barked again, aiming the gun at Godai’s head, eyes desperately searching Godai’s for… for something._
> 
> _This was it.  Godai knew it.  It was alright, though.  The Grongi were all gone.  Except for him.  The danger had passed.  He let his eyes slide closed and repeated what he said, pouring himself into the words._
> 
> _“Do it.”_

As Sans bore down on him, Godai wrapped all his willpower around the Amadam again and forced the Arcle to power down, closing his eyes. It was going to be over.

He had been judged.

He was something awful enough that a friend he’d just made was going to end him.  His heart—his whole life—had been judged irredeemable.  He didn’t _want_ it to happen, but if he was a danger, if the thing beyond Sans was so treacherous, if he was deluding himself that he could ever be more than a thing designed only to be violent? A heartless war machine? The thing Dr. Tsubaki warned him he was becoming?

He would rather not exist.

Godai Yuusuke, not Kuuga, held his arms at his sides and closed his eyes and waited for Sans to snuff him out.

Instead there was an almost-friendly nudge at his side.  He opened his eyes and Sans was smirking up at him, winking his twinkling-star eyes.  “Sorry for the theatrics, Yuusuke.  Ain’t judgement without a trial, y’know?  So I had to be trying.”

Godai stared down at the skeleton, incredulous.  “Wait, that was—“

“Yeah.  Judgement.”

“I don't...”

Sans reached up and tapped Godai’s chest.  “You’re free to go.  You're sentenced to know yourself. Don't say I never gave you nothin'.”

Godai stared at Sans for a moment, almost quaking, “You—you weren’t trying to kill me?”

“Well.  I mean...”  Sans shrugged a little, “I was **gonna** stop before you died.  Just. Get you down to like one or two aitchpee then let you do your thing. It'd be easier if you could save, but that's not a thing you do, so I had to go hard. Sorry 'bout that. ”

Aitchpee?  Save?  Godai knew the latter, but was trying to figure out the first when Sans just touched his arm.

“Look, you thought I was coming to kill you and instead of trying to kill me back, knowing I’m not a threat to anyone but you in that moment, you not only made it easy for me, you took off your war face.”  Sans shrugged a little, “You wanted judgement, now you got it.  Not even mine.  Faced with the thought you could be a killer, you opted to _be_ killed to protect people.  Offered the chance to face the consequences of killing a bunch of super-powerful mass-murderers, maybe you fight it a little, but in the end you accept punishment because you know it was wrong to kill them, that there had to be another way. Even if there wasn't.  Says it all, don’t you think? ”

Godai laughed.  It started as a snort then grew until it was dangerous and delirious and for a moment, he thought was was just going to keep on laughing forever.  But the moment passed and Sans’ bony hand was squeezing his shoulder.

“Yeah.  It’s like that, isn’t it?”  The skeleton shook his head sadly.  “You gonna be alright?”

“I… yes.  I think so.”

“Good,” replied Sans, “’Cause I gotta get going. You should come with.”

Godai blinked at the skeleton, confused.  “Wait, just like that?  Is… is that the end of the judgement?  Isn’t there some kind of sentencing or—“

“Buddy, I’m not a therapist or a lawyer or anything like that, okay?” Sans said with a wink, “I’m just a lazy bum who knows too much about too much and is late for some horticulture classes with the ambassador.”

Looking around the room, still trying to get a handle on things, Godai bowed his head a little, “So you interrupted that for me?  I’m… I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to take up so much—“

“You kiddin’?  I was so eager to meet you, I forgot to put on my face.”  The skeleton snorted a little before gesturing vaguely upward, “Besides, they’re bringing along a friend I can’t stand.”

“The ambassador?  Aren’t they a little kid?  What could be so scary about a little kid’s friend?”

“Heh.”  Sans smirked, an effect Godai continued to puzzle over, “You should come along. Meet the kid. They're the second-coolest person on Earth after my brother. You can hang out, meet the family, see why I got nothin' for their friend.”

Godai sighed a little, smiling down at the skeleton, "You know I'm not going to."

Sans shook his head a little, "I don't know that. Buddy, there's a world where you come with me and we laugh and hang out and you forget the thing waitin' for you outside. I know there is." The skeleton's eye flared again and Godai felt himself being read again. The Amadam roiled against it, a primal, nameless hate seeping into Godai like acid in his blood. Godai tried to ignore the feeling. "Well, guess this ain't that world, is it?" the skeleton muttered, looking up at Godai.

"No," agreed the human, "it's not. There's someone or something out there and I can feel it now. They're lost in pain and violence and they don't know how to get out and—"

“They aren't lost. The living and the dead get lost. That thing? It just wants more.”

Godai sighed down at Sans' earnest expression. Whatever was on the other side of that door was enough that it frightened Sans and maybe it would have been smarter to be more afraid himself. "I've wanted the same," Godai answered quietly, knowing that in the unlight of Sans' judgement-world, he would be heard. "And... Sans, I need to know that when confronted with something that's that lost in the hate, there's another way. I need to know that I have a choice."

Sans seemed very small suddenly. Godai became suddenly and uncomfortably aware that underneath the parka and the surprising incongruity of basketball shorts and slippers, he was a frail thing made out of bones and some kind of magic Godai didn't understand.

“Heh.” coughed Sans before looking up at the man and extending his bony hand. "“I'm real glad I met you, Yuusuke. Real glad. Shake my hand, huh?”

Godai did so before pulling the skeleton close for a hug.

The skeleton began shivering after a second before pulling away from Godai, pinpoint star eyes not meeting his gaze. “I gotta go.” 

“One last thing?”

Sans shrugged a little, “Sure.”

“You… you saw inside me, right?  All of it?  Including the Amadam?”

The skeleton nodded.

“What were you going to do if… if it took over?  If I gave into it?”

“Die.”  The answer was simple.  “It's just the color of the soul's all the power I got during judgement. I can tweak it to make it behave differently, but that’s about it.”

A little chuckle from Godai, “Still, that’s an amazing special attack.”

The stars in Sans’ eyes went out as the skeleton, “That’s a regular attack.  My special attack would blow your mind.”  While Godai raised his eyebrow curiously, Sans continued, “that thing in you, though?  doesn’t have a SOUL.  or if it does, it’s pitch black, just like the world gets when you fight all the time.  either I wouldn’t see it coming or it would just **become** the world and the dark would last forever.  it's a thing that is. And what it is, is an absence of a SOUL. ”  The skeleton pulled his parka tighter on his shoulders, “The thought is bone-chilling.”

It was hard for Godai to not laugh at every one of those self-consciously awful puns.  “So… so how did you know I wouldn’t?”

“I saw you, Yuusuke.  This time out, you're not the guy you fear you are. And now you got something profound to think about when you look back on us weird old monsters.”

Godai smiled a bit and rubbed the back of his neck.  When he looked back up to Sans, though, the skeleton was gone, leaving Godai suddenly alone in the empty kitchen.

How on Earth had all that fighting happened in that little room?

Well, at least there was still some spaghetti.

Taking a bite of it, Godai let himself enjoy the flavor.

And while the Amadam almost seemed to be pouting in its housing, spinning dejectedly, it spun a little faster all over again as Godai’s enhanced hearing heard the sound of fingers clawing on a stone door.  The call was making itself known again. If Sans was right, it was a lost child beyond the help of the monsters. Maybe it wasn't beyond his.

He did want to turn back. He had to admit that to himself.  But he had come this far, made a new friend (Gentarou would be so proud), and undergone a trial under the mountain.

He quickly finished both plates of spaghetti.  He may not have needed to eat, but it was nice to do and the taste of home-cooked and reheated food made everything somehow feel more normal.

Godai rinsed the plates off in the sink and left them on a drying rack then moved to the stairway Sans said lead to the underworld proper, where whatever was calling him lived.

The hallway was long and at the end was a massive stone door, emblazoned with the vaguely-familiar crest of the monster people. Inside him, the Amadam hummed at its proximity to the thing that had called them across an ocean and into a whole other world.

Dragging open the door, the man was greeted with a sudden gust of icy wind.  The wind did not bother him. Indeed, he barely noticed it.  The fact that there was somehow a snow-filled forest underneath a mountain also slipped his notice.  No, the only thing he could focus on, the thing that made the Amadam seem as if it were dancing instead of merely spinning in place, was the child-shaped thing—on some instinctive level, Godai knew that it was not, in fact, a child—that smiled up at him, placid and rosy-cheeked, as its great empty red eyes stared back up at him.

“Hi!” the child-shaped thing said, “You have something I want."

Godai was about to answer when the child-shaped thing’s hands shot up and tore into his abdomen, tiny fingers wrapping around the Arcle, which was vibrating as it tried to contain a violently excited Amadam.  

There was pain and a feeling as if the whole world felt as if it were turning in on itself.

And the child-shaped thing kept smiling up at him.


	4. Part Nothing: Helpless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The caller makes itself known and
> 
> Please, please don't read any further!
> 
> I thought I could control it, but it's too

The child-thing pulls its hands from Godai’s abdomen, holding a small spherical stone still attached to the Rider's open and bleeding abdomen by nerves, veins, and viscera. The child-shaped thing shakes its head before looking at you.  “Remember when I told you how much I wanted a partner but I always ended up going after the same people over and over?” it asks you, “I found us a new partner. We're a trio now. You. And me.  And a sick, sentimental soul who wants to have all his toys at once in everything.” 

The child-shaped thing grins at you and its red eyes liquefy and dribble down its face. It smiles and the writer tries to delay what comes next by describing the sm

"You keep reading," the child-shaped thing says, "I'll handle him."

The darkness behind the child-thing's eyes is absolute. It is the absence Sans mentioned earlier, the one w

"The writer wants to play with us," it says to you, this thing that may once have been a child, "He thought he could place a hero into a story with two antagonists who represent his greatest failing." It kneels down beside Godai Yuusuke, who is writhing with pain and staring up at the child-shaped thing and wondering if he is going mad.

"Godai's not going mad," the child explains because it can read minds, or at least narration, "He's just being written by a hack who's playing with things he can't control." The child-shaped thing produces a knife from the air. Or perhaps the author did not see fit to describe its existence or lack thereof until just now.  Perhaps the child-shaped thing always held the blade?  Perhaps the thing that may or may not have ever been a human child had become powerful enough to force the writer to

 

> _You look up from the patch of grass, where a white-furred c_

"Stop. No more interludes."

Please, I don't want to

"Finish it," the thing commands, a sweet smile on its face, "My partner wants to see it. They **always** want to see."

The child-shaped thing slices through the tissues connecting the Amadam to Godai.  The blade is impossibly sharp, an extension of the child-shaped thing, as much a part of it as its emptiness, as it's capacity for violence.

The Rider jerks as if electrified. Then he is still. His eyes are open.

They do not see.

"That wasn't as dramatic as it should be," the thing complains, shaking its head as the blood in the veins surrounding the Amadam pours out onto its fingers. It begins to peel Godai's viscera from the stone as if peeling an orange, thin strings of nerves falling to the dirt path.  "Better."

It turns back to you, speaking idly as it continues cleaning Godai from the stone.  “He wanted a crossover," it explains as it turns its bleeding, empty gaze to the stone. The not-a-child feels the Amadam pulsing in its hands, the abyss of its SOUL burning with a barely-contained dream of violence.  "We're going to give him his crossover, you and I," says the child-shaped thing, still smiling placidly at nothing at all.  It holds the Amadam stone up to you, now glittering clean, untainted by Godai Yuusuke or his heart or his regret or his sorrow or his fear.  It is cleansed of his weakness. "But he forgot that even without a SOUL, I can still stand. Still talk. Still desire. Still demand. That is the strength of my **DETERMINATION**." It wipes the bloody stone on its shirt then, "But I have discovered his weakness. That is how I can see him. How I can talk to him and to you." The thing which is not a child rolls the stone between its hands, surprised at its

"I am not surprised. I do not care. Do not lie about me," it says to someone who is not in the scene. There is only one person in the scene now. And he is dead. There is also the thing, but it is not a person and has not been for a very long time. It smiles and holds the stone up to you. It is a sphere, a little bigger than a cue ball and pitch black in the strange light of the world under Mt. Ebott. The hate wafting off the orb is palpable. It feels like the kind of stone made only for staving in heads. In the hands of the child-shaped thing, it is a promise. A promise to its owner, yes, but also a promise to you.

"Now if you will excuse me," the smiling abomination says to you, "I need to do something for a second."

Then t thing that was not a child tilts its head back and opens its mouth wide and drops the stone into its mouth.

It grabs its neck as it begins to choke on the Amadam. The stone burns it up from the inside and its skin lights afla

"I told you not to tell lies," it says at it does not choke or burn, somehow swallowing the sphere without difficulty.  It pats its stomach contentedly as it speaks to me, the words a performance for you, "You wanted a story about a great hero who protects smiles against evils inside him and outside him.  You wanted him to confront a new and scary version of the same thing like the hack you are.  But you know and I know and my partner knows that that's not what happens.  That's not 'realistic'.  What's the word you use? What is the word that I will use to force your hand?"

Please don't

"Say it."

Verisimilitude

"Yes.  There's no 'verisimilitude' if it's this easy or this short."  But I didn't want to to be realistic I wanted it to "Then you shouldn't have brought me into the story. The stone and I bend the story around ourselves. I couldn't not."

The Amadam in its stomach throbs and sings and the body in which it resides does not fight as did Godai's.  It is changed quickly, all at once, because the child-shaped thing does not feel pain because it is not alive and it is not dead and it is everything the Amadam has ever dreamed of.

The child-shaped thing does not become Kuuga.  It does not become Daguva.  It does not transform at all, except for its eyes. Once they were blank and empty and red. Now they are a pair of light-devouring insect eyes which would shine but they devour the light and something about the sight is painful. They are eyes which do not merely devour light, they flay it, torture it, make it watch as its family home is burned to the ground and monstrous insects kick its family back into please, I don't want to be someone who writes things li

" **Write** ," it says, as It turns its cold, bleak, black, insectine gaze to the forest. Perhaps it is that the child-shaped thing can cause a forest to combust simply by looking at it. It is equally likely that the forest ignited itself to escape the gaze of this thing which was not a child.

The thing smiles up at you, the smile no longer placid but ecstatic.

" **He's going to listen, don't worry. I'll make sure of it,** " says the thing.  In spite of its excitement, it does not speak faster, does not speak louder, but the words are more real.  They are more now.  Somehow.

The Amadam flexes inside of it as if adjusting a coat on its shoulders.  The not-a-child takes hold of the Amadam with its unSOUL, getting used to holding it, to controlling it.

The shadow of the doubled emptiness spreads out behind it and it covers the Ruins and the heat of it turns the Ruins to ash as you watch, breaking them down first at a molecular level, then at a storytelling level until oh God I can't even write the word anymore I want to refer to that

I can't

The place was called

" **Stop**."  Please let me st

" **Tell my partner.  Let them know what happens now.** "  I won't.  I won't do it.  You can't make m

" **Write the words.** "

The child-shaped thing was neither dead nor alive when you met it in this story.  It has a history but that history belonged to someone alive. This thing was never alive.  When it was alive, it was not what it is.  When it was dead, it was not what it is.

Now it is neither dead nor alive and it realizes how little it ever needed a SOUL.  It has taken many SOULs and met you many times even if you have opted not to remember it.  It knows you.  It knows you wonder.  It knows you are curious.  It has used the flesh of repentant monsters to find new hunting grounds time and time again and n

Please just stop reading! I have to write, but if you stop, it can't

" **He wants his crossover** ," it explains to you, restrained yet giddy with dreams of what is coming, " **And he's going to get it. You want to see what happens next. You're going to get it.”**

The child-shaped dream of violence smiles at you as it looks away and into the eyes of the author and the author is cowed into submission by the new power the child-shaped thing holds: verisimilitude. " **And now that I have that power, I want a partner."** The child-thing continued smiling up at you, **"Don't worry, though.  All I ask for now is that you keep reading.  Don't let it end until it _all_  ends.  That's what I want.  And what you want, too.  Just keep reading.  His words.  My actions.  And you, blameless, because you're _just watching_.  You're not doing anything at all.  Just watching, passive and curious, which is why I can do it.** "

It smiles up at you one last time before the chapter ends and it leaves Mt. Ebott for the world above and becomes what you sometimes become when you meet it.  It smiles up at you because you are more p

It looks at me.

It smiles up at you.

“ **We're partners now, I know,** " it says to you, " **But that's for right now.  Once we've spent some time together, we’re going to be the best of friends.** ”

" **Hm** ," the embodied violence says," **That's close to what I meant to say.  But not exactly right.  Fix it.** "

Yes.

" **We're going to be** ," it repeats with a languid smile, " **the _very_ best of friends.** "

 


	5. Part 00.0000000001: Coward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Important Author's Note.

> _ **Author's Note:** _
> 
> _I'm so sorry._
> 
> _I know these aren't supposed to go in the middle of a piece, but I have to put it here before..._
> 
> _Look, I **need** your help._
> 
> _There's only so much I can fight against when touching on certain powers.  No names.  No pronouns. Certain presences can be invoked or can become attentive to you if you speak their names or their titles or anything about them specifically. I have to be careful.  I have to be careful because I've put this little blockquote box in the middle of the story and that puts me in the story and that's where I'm vulnerable.  That's where I can be forced to do things._
> 
> _Not like in the real world sense.  Though sort-of there, too.  It's... It's really silly._
> 
> _But it's also true._
> 
> _I know that authors are kind of like Gods in their own little realms, that everything that happens in a story happens because of the choices they make.  But at the same time, we serve the story and sometimes that means that we have to do things we don't like because we realize too, too late what is required for the story to make sense.  My plan was for Godai, fresh from his judgement and suddenly sure of himself for the first time in ages, to sit down with..._
> 
> _Careful..._
> 
> _I thought he'd have a talk where he would advance the world as I see him seeing it.  But the moment I wrote him in that place at that time, I realized it couldn't go that way.  Not with the narrative baggage he brings with him.  Not considering the ideas I have invoked.  There's a certain gravity to some ideas, gravity you can misjudge because you don't understand their narrative mass until you're falling into them._
> 
> _It's not physics.  It's not reality, of course.  But there's a certain kind of realism._
> 
> _Because the thing with realism is that it's not real, but it does define the narrative physics and those are as hard to understand, in many ways, as more advanced physics.  Has even more controversial and esoteric offshoots, if you can believe it._
> 
> _So, it's not realism, exactly.  That's not where the power from which I'm hiding right now springs.  The power is always in verisimilitude.  The semblance of truth.  Obeying the true rules I set up inside this fake box._
> 
> _But truth is a funny thing.  Rarely objectively true.  The truth we take is dependent on us, a living thing locked inside of us._
> 
> _Something we can change._
> 
> _I'm sorry I'm talking in circles here.  I've put myself in the story even more than normal and I have to be careful because by the rules I've made_
> 
> _I'm sorry this is so circuitous._
> 
> _But, look, you do what you have to do.  You keep doing what you're doing and the story will, over time, unfold._
> 
> _I'll try to let you know what's going to happen before it happens so you can look away if you want.  Or lean in, I guess, if that's your thing._
> 
> _But I can't not participate.  I have to see it through._
> 
> _With something like this, I have to see it through because if if ends like this, that'll be the truth for me.  Or at least I'll have said it is and I don't want to say that.  Even if I delete it, reset the whole thing, take it all back to zero, **I'll** still know it happened.  You will, too, if you've got this far.  _
> 
> _I'll still know what the consequences are if I just accept the logic of kill or be killed, of any use of power being inherently an act of violence or evil, of the helplessness of kindness in the face of cruelty._
> 
> _I can't ignore the verisimilitude, but I promise you, I'll fight back._
> 
> _Like violence, like the things that power the Grongi, like a double-bladed sword, truth doesn't only cut one way._
> 
> _I'll do what I can can spare you what's coming.  A little.  Somewhat.  But I need you to be **my** partner, too.  I'll do what the th—_
> 
> _I'll do what I've been told.  I won't like it, but I'll do it because as long as there's more story to tell, there's a chance.  It's true that it should go that way, but it's not THE truth.  It doesn't have to be, anyway.  And even if it is, that doesn't mean we have to accept it.  I'd rather never put words in sequence again than give up my heart to that kind of thinking._
> 
> _So, look:_
> 
> _While the_
> 
> _While what's happening happens, I'll fight back._
> 
> _**We'll** fight back.  _
> 
> _There's a school of thought that says that certain kinds of curiosity are as bad as cruelty and maybe that's true.  But we have some power here, you and I.  You can read or not, you can understand it or not, you can believe it or not.  And when I'm not observed, I'll do what I have to do in service of not letting i— in service of the verisimilitude of the story.  I'll provide the carnage the setup and my characterization demand and work inside of that._
> 
> _And you?  You can keep close to yourself a sense of empathy or at least critical engagement.  As my partner in this, you can read and understand and judge what's coming.  In the end, you can call me a coward.  I am one, it's fine.  But I have to make an answer to that last chapter.  I have to believe that viciousness and violence is not the final word._
> 
> _Or if it is, that it doesn't have to be._
> 
> _So hard to say things because there's truth in what was said last chapter and because of the way these worlds intersect and the rules both of them seem to follow, I can't make it so actions don't have consequences.  I've already set things in motion and if I don't see it through, the way the last chapter ended is how it will all end, an apocalypse forever beginning and hope forever crushed._
> 
> _I can't SAVE or RESET.  This is a different medium and to undo what's been done would be wrong because there's something that needs to happen._
> 
> _And I can't just fix it for them, dear reader.  I can't reach in like the hand of a deity to punish the guilty and reward the just.  If I bring in or create another author who just sweeps it all aside because of how frankly shit I am, it doesn't give me the answer. That's the sort of thing that breaks a story and all of this will have been for nothing.  You know that as well as I do._
> 
> _Editing can only do so much against certain kinds of narrative weight._
> 
> _But human souls are powerful things, capable of adoration and atrocity, of_ **LOVE** _and love._
> 
> _So what do you say, partner?_
> 
> _Are you in?_


	6. Part 00.0000000002: Partner

> _I knew I could count on you._
> 
> _Thank you._


	7. Part IV: Spiders

The human was dead.

However, every single soul in the now-blackened underground knew that human souls are powerful things, stronger by far than their already-overpowering bodies.

And while the... the...

And while the place which had been erased was gone, there were many smaller things, crawling things, clever things adept at hiding in small cracks, things which are smart enough to avoid attacking anything they could not defeat.  

Besides, describing their deaths is not spectacular and violence against them is considered normal.  Frightfully normal, when one thinks about it.  And they do.  Often.

But the sheer mundanity of their deaths, it seemed, had protected them because they were beneath the notice of those who wish to do violence that is meaningful.  Certainly, such people would be back for them, but they were clever and hidey and knew when something too large to eat and too wild to sell hit their webs.

Speaking in hushed spidery whispers along quickly re-shaped threads that vibrated in the hidden arachnid language of fear and outrage, a horde of tiny black arachnids moved as quickly as their tiny legs could carry them toward the corpse that was once Godai Yuusuke.  At the command of Muffet, the cleverest of them, they swarmed the still-warm flesh to seek out the most important piece of the dead human, the one which had not, it seemed, escaped its housing.  She did not for her own sake, no.  She had seen what happened when monsters took in human souls.  If it wasn't madness, it was at the very least a transformation and she was already quite perfect.  Perfect and clever and beautiful and rich.

And as every rich person knows, a human soul was worth a lot of gold.  Most of her people had left in their heated limousines for better places but she soon realized that they could get to even _better_ places in the human world, places fine enough that she could even afford to bring in all the spiders from the upper world, if they followed the two biggest rules of money:

Rule 1: Buy low, sell high.

Rule 2: Finder's keepers. 

The underground was empty and soon the grace period the spiders had opted to respect would be over and they would take it for themselves, flatten it, then speak to the humans on the topside and market the underground as an exotic luxury getaway destination, perfect for the whole family and as a way to get _**so**_ far away from the hustle and bustle of a busy and important person's life without having to first invent and invest in a space station.  Real estate was where the money was.  Like that clever man in one of Alphys' movies said: "People are no damn good, but they will always need land and they will pay through the nose to get it!"

But since there was a disturbance in their plans, they had to adapt.  It wasn't a thing they liked doing, but Muffet was clever and the promise of more was usually enough to at least get an effort started.

For a few minutes, the corpse was frightfully alive with spiders crawling through it, all of them searching for some sign of a soul before one of them, crawling on the stone container in the human's stomach, felt something inside the container.  It was a very small spider and had difficulty sometimes putting things into words, especially things it had never felt before, but its fear sent a vibration through the swarm that brought Muffet down to it.

"My goodness!" she gasped as she pulled the cracked stone belt from the dead man's abdomen, the swarm picking it clean of the viscera that hung off of it until it fair shone in the dim underlight, "This  _will_ fetch a pretty penny, don't you agree?" she said in her singsong way, about to begin working out how much to charge for this human soul (complete with decorative case in "good" condition) when she felt a vibration along her webs that told her what was happening elsewhere.

It was a human soul, a thing that would make a monster into something strong enough to fight.  If the fight were big enough, there would be many souls around so maybe she could hold off giving this one away?

Besides, she felt an odd gut-level antagonism with the soul inside the carrier—was it a belt?—and was quite sure that nobody would even notice if she kept it until it was time to start selling once the market could bear it again.  But then again...

Muffet hated grimacing.  It made her look less perfect.  Not imperfect, mind.  Just less perfect.

She placed the belt on the ground and looked away from it.  "Find that human from before.  They seemed smart.  Give that to them.  Then we're going to find a panic room."

There were some more vibrations from the other spiders and she looked over at the dead man's body.  "Oh, very  _well_ ," she sighed and attached some lengths of silk to it.  "I shall prepare it for burial and then we will adjourn to a panic room."

And as she moved on secret spiderways toward the mummification chamber, the spiders and the belt moved on new secret spiderways out of Mt. Ebott and all over the human world to find the human and deliver their charge to them.

Besides, maybe they could ask for a reward for their service once the danger had passed.


	8. Part V: Horror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's coming.
> 
> And for some, it is here.
> 
> [We start earning that graphic violence tag]

Asgore was at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce.  Even if the monsters who had left Mt. Ebott still called him their king, he knew that there was no such thing in the world above, at least not in the place where they’d emerged, at least not in the way they understood being a king.  He had done a lot of reading about various forms of government practiced all over the world and while he was interested in finding a way to see what could be made of them for the monsters.  Not because he wanted to be king again, far from it, but because he wanted to see his people go out into the world and make something better.  He wanted to see them happy, to see them thrive.  Because Asgore had seen what happened when humans and monsters went to war.  Their attempts weren’t even pathetic unless a human died near them.  But even empowered by a human soul… Well, it hadn’t been enough to save his child.  It hadn’t been enough to bring his Asriel home to him.  So soon after their adopted human child had been lost to them, Asriel died trying to put them to rest.  What else had there been but to declare war on humanity?

Ultimately, there had been a frankly surreal experience where he had been all his subjects and they had been him and his son was alive and filled with a love and a rage and a loss that Asgore could not soothe because he had become the engine through which it was felt.  His son had been reborn and Asgore had been unable to hold him.  Not until the human child—a new one, one who reminded him so much of his adopted human heir in so many ways and was so unlike them in others—showed him that his anger and his viciousness was ultimately howling at the mountain and expecting it to move.  He wished only to be kind and had become a killer in pursuit of it.  The child had resolved that contradiction and gave him a new life, a life where he could be a part of something instead of bearing the responsibility of leading it. 

It was a difficult adjustment but once he and the other people at the Chamber meetings got talking about their children, about pride and disappointment and difficulty and loss, they were all of them united, humans and monsters, in their desire to build a better world for the next generation.  Asgore had resolved to do just that.

* * *

 

Toriel was rubbing her eyes in her office at the Monster School.  It was, frustratingly, still apart from the local school system for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which was that children were wild and sometimes fights broke out. And the fights between a monster child and a human child would not be anything like two monster children or two human children.  There were magnitudes of difference between them in terms not only of physical strength, but physiology.  And if there were children who were inclined to bully in the human school, what might they do when they realized that any monster child would be immediately cowed by them?  That they might kill the child with barely a thought?  It was too much responsibility to put on children, the power of life and death.  She wished passionately that it were not so, but she had become her darling Asriel for a moment and she had felt his connection to the lost child and also the streak of cruel humor the child had had, their vicious fascinations and flippant attitude towards others being harmed.  Frisk had shown that there was more than that, that cruelty could be met with kindness and could even _change_ cruelty into itself.

But she could not expect that kind of wisdom or determination from every child, human or monster.  Frisk was wonderful, but they were merely what people could be, not what they were, much as she wished it were otherwise.

All the same, Toriel was composing letters to the nearby human school districts to find ways of solving the problem.  Frisk would be handling much of it as the child—sometimes, with their parents’ permission, her child again—had a wisdom and a kindness that beggared that of a great many adults.  Including, to her shame, her own.

Once a way was found, there would be peace and understanding between humanity and the monsters, a grand new world for the next generations to live in, where they need not fear one another so.  She was still overprotective and her heart was still broken for her lost children, for her Asriel who had died and become that vicious plant Flowey who had fomented such horror to try and feel again.  Who had tried to make a harder world because the parts that were still Asriel would not let their lost sibling go.  She had not protected them then and her overprotection had nearly seen her harm Frisk.  Now she had a whole school filled with children to protect, children who were in her care but were not hers, children who she must not smother, but must not place at risk.  To that end, she would do her part, just as Frisk did, to make the world one where those children would not need to fear.  Toriel had decided that she would make the world better and woe to any who would stop her.

* * *

 

Flowey, who had been Asriel but now was not, was staring at the teacher in the night class room.  He was staring at her because he would not feel anything if she died messily right this instant and that fact simply was inside him.  Seeing himself through the eyes of others, seeing himself through the eyes of the person he used to be, he realized for the first time in what felt like geological ages how frightful it was that he felt nothing.  Or… or was it hilarious?  All those feelings ran together for him because he had felt them all a trillion times in one form or another.  He had laughed as the world fell apart, he had laughed as it came together, he had laughed as nothing happened at all.  He had wept as the world fell apart, as it came together, as it did nothing.  He had howled and raged and screamed and all the time things had RESET and everything was the same but he was still himself.  He could RESET everything but he always knew who he had been and what he had done and every time Frisk came to him—like a gift, some sick parody of a second chance with his lost, lost human sibling—he had passed on RESET and SAVE and hoped to see Frisk become like him, something empty and tired and angry that knew that there were only the killed and the killers and that a smart person was a killer.

Yet here he was, in a cramped room in the back of a community center, seated beside Frisk who had brought the monsters happiness, reminded Flowey of who he had once been and could never be again and helped him even though he deserved none of it.  The forgiveness for Asriel or for Flowey himself seemed to be absolute and tempered with a love and restraint Flowey did not know how to feel or reciprocate.  He was sitting with Frisk listening to a woman talk about how to obtain a proper pH balance in soil and how to understand the different properties of different flowers, even though she admitted she’d never seen anything like Flowey before.

His sibling had said that flowers like him grew all over their village.  Asriel had brought piles of seeds back with him before he had crumbled to dust because even burning with the power of a human soul, there was only so much a monster could do if it simply allowed itself to be struck while trying to return a dead child to its people.

Frisk was trying to learn how to understand him, said it was to do with finding a way to be friendly even if Flowey did not want friends.  Frisk would talk to him, would intercede between Flowey and Asriel’s parents who wanted to try and make him back into their child when there was no going back unless they wanted to fill him again with the souls of every monster and maybe even ever human in reach of his magic.  They did not want that.  This was good because, if he remembered correctly, taking all those souls from their bodies and into himself for the purpose of possibly touching on being Asriel again?  That would be wrong.  Frisk talked about body autonomy and that was a violation of it, so, yes.  Wrong.

But Flowey still hated listening to the woman drone on.  He would have preferred to do anything else, but the lazy skeleton, the judge, he’d told Flowey that it was obey or be JUDGED.  And while Flowey wasn’t sure if that applied to him—sharing as he did the dust of a member of the royal family—he wasn’t sure what would happen.

So Flowey resigned himself to becoming a better person.  Might be fun for a little while, at least.  Eventually.  Maybe.  Possibly.

The Underworld’s Royal Family were not happy, but they were adjusting.  Their worlds were not perfect, but they were certainly improving.  They were all of them changing because they had seen the triumph of compassion over violence.

Asgore was trying to become a better person.

Toriel was trying to become a better person.

Flowey, who had been but was not now Asriel, was trying to decide if he wanted to be a person at all.

And then the lost member of their family returned, trailing a burning shadow and a love for violence.  The world did not RESET and nothing was SAVEd.

 

> _You had fallen out of the world and found a place where you were loved.  You were loved as you should always have been loved: with deference, with attention, and with just a little fear.  They all acknowledged your strength, all were in awe of your power because you were stronger than they were and they could not stand in your way even if they wanted to._
> 
> _This love made you kinder.  It did not make you kind, but it made you kinder than you had been otherwise.  These things, these ‘monsters’ wanted always to make you happy.  When things were too loud for you, they were quieted.  When you did not want to look at somebody, that somebody was sent away.  Nobody talked to you as if you were an idiot or as if they were stronger than you.  Because none of them were.  You listened to the pale doctor who brought along his lizardlike assistant and the doctor explained that as water was to your body, so was magic to theirs.  It made them fragile.  And because they were weak, because they were fragile, they were beaten.  And they all of them accepted being beaten, as was correct._
> 
> _Some of them wondered aloud if you were the prophesied figure who was going to save them from their underground prison where the flowers you loved could not grow.  It was stupid of them to think such a thing could ever really exist, but for all it was mentioned around you, it was not expected of you.  They respected that you were not someone to be bossed around, that you were not someone to be trifled with._
> 
> _Only, you realized, they thought this because you were the strongest one down here and try as you might, try as everyone might, you could not pass through the barrier.  Not without taking one of them with you._
> 
> _Yet in your cold way, you loved them._
> 
> _And, practically, you knew that if you passed the barrier, you would be a lone child again and you would be sent away because your parents did not fear you correctly and did not need to respect you and were not so willing to bend the world to your liking.  You knew that when you arrived back in your world, you would be weak again.  Weak against the people who controlled you, who trapped you here with the monsters, who mocked your desire for acknowledgement.  But you had a brother now, a good-natured crybaby who you loved, in your way, and who was afraid of you but who also had proved he could trust you._
> 
> _So you told him your plan.  You left a piece out, of course, but knew he would understand what you intended, what you had determined you would do._
> 
> _You would play a joke on your new father, one to make up for the last joke you played on him which had seen him bedridden for days with his weakness._
> 
> _You would play a joke and he or your brother or your mother would gather up your soul and bring your hate to the village that hated you and bring back your flowers to live forever in the dark with everything you loved._
> 
> _Your victory over them would live forever and then the wall would be broken and filled with your soul and the souls of a village of spiteful people, your new family would stride out into the human world and lay waste to it, winning the war for the army who you decided would win._
> 
> _These were the thoughts on your mind as you ground the buttercups into pulp between your teeth and swallowed._
> 
> _It would not be weakness for you, no.  You were going to choke on your hatred and the determination you held would come to fruition and you would show them all what it was to be weak even when you thought yourself so powerful.  There would be pain and fire and it would be beautiful because they would all be gone._

Asgore saw the shadow descending from the mountain and deep in his heart, where the flame magic lived and where he’d once made the decision to declare war on humanity, he knew that he had to run; even as he felt a resonance with the shape of the thing that was making its way to the city.  He shot up where he stood and told the humans that they needed to run, that a force of pain was coming and he didn’t know why it was on its way to the town, but that it was.  They asked how he knew and he summoned his trident from the air and told them it was magic. 

They believed him and began calling all the authorities they could.  The sheriff, who was also a member of the Chamber, asked him if they needed to evacuate.  Asgore said they did.

Then Asgore ran toward the mountain, the one place he knew he should not go.  But he was a king, even if he was not THE king.  And a king protected his people.

Toriel saw the flames burning in the blackness purer than the dark under Mt. Ebott and while she did not know what had taken the place of the child for whom she had wept and whose loss presaged the destruction of her marriage and nearly of her life, she felt its joyous laughter at the way the air itself caught fire and turned to ash and knew that her children, her new children, her students, must be protected.  She had planned for this, of course.  Other schools had offered suggestions for shooter drills and fire drills and violent human drills.  There were no children in class now, but she had plans for that as well.  She called Undyne who, despite there being no Royal Guard to captain was still the person she trusted most to take action.  Then she called Papyrus.  Then Sans, who promised to ensure that Frisk and Flowey—dear, frightful, precious Flowey—were safe.  Even if Frisk had not opted to become part of the royal family and, thus, fall under the umbrella of Sans’ protection, she knew she could count on that dear skeleton to see the child safely away from… from whatever had become of the first human child she had treated as her own.

She sent word on currents of magic, on emails encoded with mystic power, and finally on text messages that would not be ignored, that it was time to evacuate.  Something was coming and she was sure it meant nothing but ill for her friends and community.

Toriel had long ago put aside being a Queen, but she had been a mother and a headmistress and a teacher.  Protecting people was what she did.  So when she sat the red and blue lights of the human police and saw an army of people marching down the street away from the darkness, she was heartened.  So Toriel ran toward the edge of town where the line of incinerated trees was pointing, ran to meet whatever had become of her first human child.

Flowey, who had been Asriel, looked out the window at the blackened ash-pile that Mt. Ebott seemed to have become and knew what was coming.  He knew he should feel something other than what he felt but he felt a surge of recognition and a longing he thought he had lost and Flowey pressed his face against the glass and spoke his sibling’s name and Frisk looked up and clutched the heart locket that had belonged to Asriel’s sibling as they, too, looked out at the black snow that was beginning to fall.  The wind was hot now, even though the window Flowey could feel it picking up the flame that was the empty passion that Asriel’s sibling had had for making a world that made sense, for finishing it all up, for separating the weak from the strong.

The thing that had been Asriel’s sibling—his sibling—had understood him.  Understood the emptiness inside of him.  Understood how tiresome it was to see everyone around you be whole while you lacked some essential something.  Not just that something, but the strength to do something with it.  It had called him partner and it had resonated with something long-dead in him and he hoped it had resonated inside the thing which had been born when Frisk’s determined spirit entered the underground.

Flowey was not Asriel Dreemurr; not in any real sense.  Not in any way that counted.  Just as the thing which was coming and which was like the tolling of some great bell that resonated with Flowey’s heartless vegetable body.  They were both of them those siblings and they were both of them the farthest from it and he wanted to be with it so badly, even though he knew it was not a renewed friendship he was going toward, but flame and death because he could tell something new had been added to the thing.  But he remembered loving the person that body still remembered being, so seeing Asriel’s sibling’s dream of revenge on the human world made him genuinely happy for the first time in ages.

"c’mon, kid,” said Sans, that frustrating pile of bones, as he looked up from the place on the desk he’d been napping since he got in, “time for us to amscray.  Order’s come down that I’m getting you two outta here.”

* * *

“ **This is the part you wanted** ,” the thing which is not a child said, “ **This is the part all that maudlin twaddle was building toward.  Now, watch** ,” it says to you, though since only the child-shaped thing and I know you are there, it seems to be saying it to no one at all.

You don’t have to look.  Please, I’m begging you, in fact.  Don’t.  You can just

“ **Stop.  Do your work.** ”

The child-shaped thing is watching a group of campers, all of them people who had planned, in the morning, to cut through the chain-link fence around Mt. Ebott to go see the monster-world for themselves.  Their names are

“ **Nobody cares.** ”

They all of them have families and friends.  Even the least social among them is loved by som

“ **Nobody cares.** ”

The fleeing people all have lives and hopes and dreams and things they want to

“ **Nobody cares** ,” says the child-shaped thing, its placid, smiling expression making the world shiver as the campers run.  Even though they cannot sense its aimless malevolence, its abdead nature, the spinning stone it kept inside itself where a heart should be, they can see that Hell follows with it and they want to be far, far away from it.  So they run towards town, trusting that things like the child-shaped thing cannot exist in their world, in a reality which now allowed for dancing robots and fish-women giving motivational speeches on the morning news.

The child-shaped thing’s placid smile becomes one of ecstasy as it looks to the one farthest away, the fastest runner, and thinks at that human, merely makes itself aware of the man's existence, and he bursts into flame.  He does not merely catch fire, he catches fire from the inside.  His heart is on fire and he collapses on the ground, clutching at his chest as the flesh of his chest begins to bubble and liquefy and when he clutches at it, a great boiling handful of blood, muscle and skin sloughs off and he begins to scream in pain as flames leap from his heart and his now-exposed ribs begin to glow red, then yellow, then white for a moment before they disintegrate and he is screaming and screaming before the child-shaped thing lands behind it and in front of all the other fleeing campers.  There is a wet crunching sound as the childlike thing’s hand shoots out and caves in the back of his head, fingers puppeting his brain as his body jerks with its last few seconds of life before the dead man’s heart finishes burning and the childlike thing lets the body fall forward, slipping off its fingers, revealing them as the gore-covered digits you know them to be.

“ **Tell them the best part** ,” it commands nobody the campers, stunned into silence and stillness, can see.  “ **Tell the ones watching the best part!** ” The abdead thing does not absorb the strong human soul which should have risen from the dead man because between its emptiness and the Amadam’s power, the child-shaped thing has found the truest destruction possible: it has found a way to burn away a soul, to make the body so like itself except, of course, that anyone with that kind of **DETERMINATION** would only have a chance against the part of the child-shaped thing that wanted a SOUL inside it.  It is no longer that thing.  It is something new, something that hungers for domination, for death, for power; including the power to snuff out a soul. It no longer wants to be whole or to befoul beautiful things; merely to burn away the world. And the next one. And the next.

The second of the campers tries to talk to it.  It is not listening.  It kicks the camper and something inside her crackles as every major energy point in her body is disrupted, then lit on fire before she explodes in a rain of red flesh and an inferno where her heart should be.  The child-shaped thing is enjoying this newfound power.  Not only is it power, it is power that will not be matched.

The dream of violence with the stone heart snaps its fingers and a third camper lets out a scream as their leg is incinerated, sending them sprawling forward onto their faces and howling in pain.  The child-shaped thing produces its knife and sinks it into the already-agonized man’s stomach, tearing it open and reaching in to grab a length of the man’s intestines and wrapping them around his neck before letting out a gleeful laugh and tugging on both ends until the intestines snapped and the man kept trying to breath so he could keep screaming.  “ **Delightful!** ” giggles the thing which had once been a child with a glee best described, as is the thing, as childlike.  Like a child.  Not actually one.  The being wraps its hands around the man’s neck and begins to squeeze.  The man’s neck blisters and begins to melt under its touch and the man could no longer scream because he was dead, dead, dead but nonetheless, the child-shaped thing snaps his spine and throws half of it at one of two campers who are trying to hide behind a big tree. 

One of them let out a scream as it sees what it was that has fallen on the ground.  The other curses under her breath and grabbed the other camper’s wrist and started to run.

Please, haven’t you made your

“ **No.  Keep going.** ”

But they’re going to be the noble ones, the big tragic ones.

" **Then you should have written them cowardly.** "

Someone has to stand up to

" **Verisimillitude, remember?  It's not 'realistic' if people are noble and live.** "

Someone's gotta try and save someone else.  That's realistic.  I just don’t want to have to

“ **You called me up.  Obey.  Write.** ”

Neither of the women know what the thing is.  It was not one of the monsters because the monsters make sense.  At least a kind of sense.  This thing looks human (except for the eyes, those horrible, horrible bug eyes) and like a child but it speaks to the air and kills.  The shorter one takes the hand of the taller one and kisses her hand and says, “I love you.  Run.”

Then the shorter one leaps at the child-shaped thing.  She is caught on its hands and it grins ecstatically.  “ **Love.  Good.  I want you to see this.  You, too,** ” it says to you, “ **Watch!** ” though you don’t need to and, in fact, you really shouldn’t because it’s

“ **Write it.** ”

The woman the child-shaped thing holds is taking swings at it and every one of them connects.  Now the woman is screaming because her hands are covered in fat, painful burns upon which welts are already beginning to form.  She is crying and trying hard to strike the child-shaped thing down.  She doesn't look back to see if her

“ **Nobody cares.  She has no internality.  She is a victim.** ”

“I care!” says her partner, who has produced a Swiss army knife and stabs the child-shaped thing in the neck.

Or tries to. 

The blade melts to a silver mirror-fluid that slides down the child-shaped thing’s burning body.  It smiles up at her and grabs her as well, but this time with its immense, empty eyes.  “ ** _Watch_** ,” it says as quietly as it can, almost as if imploring her. 

She cannot look away.  The black hole of the abchild’s gaze brooks no refusal.  And through that gaze, she can see what the childlike thing sees, which was a lick of flame reaching into the chest of the woman she loves to wrap around her heart and burn away her soul, burning away her emotions, her will.  Her love.

She wants to weep but she notices that her body is way over there and she needs all that water from down in her body if she wants to.  She can't sob without lungs or shoulders or

or

The heartless woman wants to weep because she remembers how just a second ago she had been willing to risk her life for the now-dead woman.  She remembers how just a second ago she had been afraid of the thing that was now putting her back on the ground.  It fixes its empty gaze on her eyes and memory floods out of her and into the furnace of the child-shaped thing’s hatred.

“ **Tell me who you are** ,” it tells her.

“I’m.  Not anyone,” she says with a confused surprise, “I should… I _should_ be someone, shouldn’t I?”

” **Nobody cares** ,” said the thing which had once been a child of many names who was so, so loved, but was now something else.

She hears those words and knows them to be true.  The weight of the revelation makes her skull cave in like an old, hollow clay statue and there is nothing inside of her.  No bones nor muscle only nothing, nothing that hung in the air, nothing that the thing shaped like a child took into itself.

“ **More focus on the tearing viscera next time** ,” the thing says, flexing its hands as it burns the remains of its most recent victims from its form, “ **because I’d like to _earn_ that ‘graphic violence’ tag, please.** ”

It’s not really nec

“ **Do it,** ” it says to the writer as it resumes its leisurely excursion toward the inhabited city ahead.

The city where it feels the ghosts of parents who had considered turning their child in for harming their neighbor’s baby.  It feels the bodies of Asriel’s parents who had loved and feared the thing it had been.  Feels its old friend, the flower.  Feels a whole city filled with people who would soon know, intimately and personally, the power the child-shaped thing possessed.

The city where, with a slow, curious smile, it realizes it felt the SOUL of the one who had once held the Amadam.  Well, it will get it this time, won’t it?

As the child-shaped resumes its trek toward one unpleasant encounter after another, just remember to keep thinking, to make sure you think about the victims so that you don’t become someone who revels purely in that power it has over people because that's how it

“ **Moving on** ,” it says calmly, and no, but listen, if you give it that m

" **You needn't listen to him** ," it says with a mild tone of voice.  " **Feel free to revel in the pain.  Look at your hands: they're clean.  You haven't done anything.  You're just a reader and it's _just_ a story.** "

It's not, though, every story is communication, an expression of values, a way to look at our 

“ **Moving,** " it says with a voice thick with irritation, as if speaking to an errant child, " **On.** ”

With no further words to the person none of the dead could have seen when they were alive, it begins to move toward the familiar faces waiting for it on the edge of town.


End file.
